Unravelling History and Cultural Heritage in Botswana

Author(s): Neil Parsons

Source: Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 32, No. 4, Heritage in Southern Africa
(Dec., 2006), pp. 667-682
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25065144
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Journal of Southern African Studies, Volume 32, Number 4, December 2006 V\ Routledge
g^ Taylor& Francis Group

Unravelling History and Cultural Heritage

in Botswana *

Neil Parsons
(University of Botswana)

Cultural heritage is today contested between historical scholarship based in educational

institutions and popular and commercial presentations of the past emphasising myths and
legends. A revival of interest in heritage in Botswana over the past few generations has been
counterbalanced by a decline of interest in the study of history in schools and the university.
If one looks back more than a century, however, the study of history and the presentation of
heritage in myths and legends were almost indistinguishable. History textbooks published in
Setswana in 1913 and 1940, and in English in 1952, presented parallel tribal traditions in a
manner suitable for multi-tribal federalism. Professional research into and publication
of national history, in English, supporting unitary state ideology, only came after
independence with the opening of a university in which History was at first regarded as a
key subject. Since then, History has been deposed within the curriculum by the march
towards job-specific vocational education and by new forms of heritage presentation.
Recent assertion of sub-national ethnicities, in alliance with local tourist and entertainment
interests, challenges cultural and historical narratives written in support of the post
independence unitary state.

And on the pedestal these words appear:

'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings;
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away...
(Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1791-1822)

Just a few kilometres from Lobatse, on the South African side of the border, stands an
Ozymandian contradiction between the signified and the signifier. Some years ago a small
monument was placed next to the remains of buildings at Mabotswa, to mark the fact that
David Livingstone had lived there (1843-46). But within the last decade or so the site
(renamed 'Livingstone' on maps) has been levelled to make way for a car park, so that tourists
can now sit in their cars on top of the destroyed site and contemplate the monument marker. In
much the same way as visitors in museums now engage with computer-simulations and ignore

* The original version of this article was delivered at the conference on 'Heritage in Southern Africa: Imagining and
Marketing Public Culture and History' in Livingstone, Zambia, 6 July 2004. It bears no resemblance to the talk by
me with a similar title but entirely different content given at the bi-annual meeting of the South African Historical
Association at the Rand Afrikaans University (later University of Johannesburg), 24-26 June 2002.
ISSN 0305-7070 print; 1465-3893 online/06/040667-16
? 2006 The Editorial Board of the Journal of Southern African Studies DOI: 10.1080/03057070600995350

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668 Journal of Southern African Studies

actual artefacts, the evidence of/for history has literally given way to the monumental
presentation of heritage.
Over the past decade (cultural) heritage studies has crept up on history and archaeology in
southern African universities, and even threatens to nudge them aside by offering practical
careers for our graduates in heritage and tourist 'industries'. At the University of Botswana, a
proposed heritage studies graduate programme has been stretched and stalled between the
claims of the Archaeology Unit in the Department of History and the claims of Tourism
Studies within the Faculty of Business.
Historians find it easy to be rude about heritage studies: 'A modish new subject lacking
any inherent discipline'. 'Pre-packaged and commoditised history with the bumps smoothed
out - offering fixed rather than fluid evidence of the past'. 'Obsessed with questions of
image ("branding") and property ("whose heritage?")'. But historians have always had to
live with simplifications and popularisations; they are an essential part of the secondary
processes of transmission of knowledge of the past. That is fine as long as they are
complemented and superseded by analysis and conclusions based on primary research. This
article, however, proceeds on the basis that history as analysis of the past, and cultural
heritage as presentation of the past, are two sides of the same coin - one largely facing the
public, and the other facing the academic community. Cultural heritage studies and the
heritage industry obviously need to be periodically re-informed about the past by the study of
history, but equally historians need to analyse and tackle questions raised by presentations of
heritage.

History and Cultural Heritage in Botswana

As in other African countries, the idea of regaining our history was immensely popular in
Botswana during the 1960s and 1970s, but has declined and been replaced by rhetoric about
culture and heritage. Even the language has been appropriated.
Whereas the 1925 third edition of the Setswana English Setswana Dictionary gives two
words for history: dingwao and polelo, the 1993 fourth edition of the same dictionary gives
us dingwao, polelo ya ditso and histori. The last word is obviously a new term coined from
the English. Polelo ya ditso is uncontroversial: polelo means 'telling; a report; an essay', ya
stands for 'of, and ditso means 'origins of peoples, tribes or nations; cultures; history'
(1993). But look up the word dingwao, translated in the 1925 edition as 'Legends;
traditions; histories', and you will find that the 1993 edition has replaced 'histories' by
'cultures'. The 1993 definition reads the word as 'cultures; legends; traditions', in that
order.1
Within Botswana government circles, the word Ngwao, the singular form of dingwao, has
been appropriated since the 1980s by the National Museum (and latterly by the Department of
Youth, Sport and Culture) to mean 'culture', and it has been closely linked with Boswa,
meaning 'heritage' or 'inheritance'. The slogan 'Ngwao ke Boswa' rendered as 'Our Culture
is Our Heritage' has become so commonplace that it has been elided into a hyphenated term
Ngwao-Boswa.
Hence President Seretse Khama's famous statement of 1970, 'We should write our
own history books ... because ... a nation without a past is a lost nation, and a people
without a past is a people without a soul', is today conventionally rendered in official

1 J.T. Brown (comp.), Secwana Dictionary (Vryburg, Tiger Kloof Book Room, 3rd edition 1925), pp. 35, 58, 60,
63, 443; Z.I. Matumo (comp.), Setswana English Setswana Dictionary (Gaborone, Macmillan Botswana for
Botswana Book Centre, 1993), pp. 41, 45, 50, 286, 537.

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 Unravelling History and Cultural Heritage in Botswana 669

pronouncements without any reference to history as 'A nation without a culture is a nation
without a soul'.2
As in other African countries, the enthusiasm shown among ruling elites for history in the
early years after Independence has since dissipated. History and geography in primary and
junior secondary schools have long given way to civics-based social studies in Botswana.3
Now history and geography have come under the same threat in senior secondary schools -
greatly reducing the employability of history graduates, and reducing history and archaeology
enrolments at the University of Botswana from 2004-2005 onwards. (Geography survives at
university level by virtue of having realigned itself with the natural sciences 20 years ago,
taking upon itself the name 'environmental science' that is used by departments of ecology
and even botany elsewhere.)
Environmental heritage areas and cultural/artistic performances have undergone a minor
renaissance of state interest over the last generation in Botswana - although continuing to be
largely neglected at university level. Neo-traditional dancing, once confined to a couple of
adult troupes performing for visiting foreign dignitaries at the national airport, exploded into
Botswana's upper primary and junior secondary schools in the 1990s. The Tsodilo Hills and
their rock art in the northwest have become a World Heritage Site, and more such sites are
mooted.4 Wildlife reserves have been purged of their Khoe and San inhabitants, because they
no longer (as if they ever did) conform to received tourist stereotypes of Wild Bushmen, and
new major roads (notably the Trans-Kgalagadi Highway) have been left deliberately
unfenced, all in the name of environmental conservation.
The old cry for history from African nationalists, from Pixley Seme's famous plea of 1906
('Oh, for that historian who, with the open pen of truth, will bring to Africa's claim the
strength of written proof...') onwards, was basically a cry for the rediscovery of dignity - for
the consolations of Heritage or Boswa. And it has been a cry for old-fashioned 'patriotic' and
positivistic history - the desired 'truth' - not for the critical study of history that has been
practised by academics for the past 60 or 70 years. Today, the cry among ruling elites is more
likely to be, 'We must forget the past', as the critical study of history threatens cruel
comparisons with present regimes.
The concept of heritage, both intellectual and material, carries the implication that we
should conserve it as public property in trust for future generations. There is therefore a
tendency to regard heritage as a fixed commodity to be passed on. But we should remind
ourselves that texts and images inherited from the past, no less than artefacts and sites, have
been through many stages of construction, cleaning and polishing before they reach public
presentation. Hence the rest of this article.5

2 The Voice (Francistown), 7 June 2002, p. 16, carried an advertisement headed 'Department of Culture and Youth
Hosts Cultural Day'. It began 'THE FIRST president of Botswana Sir Seretse Khama once said: A nation without
a culture is a nation without a soul.' It went on to celebrate languages, folk games, dances, musical instruments
and finger-licking food from 'the olden days'. There was no mention of legends, origins or past events - of
history.
3 Q.N. Parsons, 'Threat or Promise? Integrated Social Studies - For and Against', Motlhasedi Education and
Development Forum (Mmabatho), 15, 1 (April-May 1996), pp. 45-8.
4 See Botswana National Commission for UNESCO (United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural
Organisation), Information Magazine No 7 - 2005 Report (Gaborone, Ministry of Education, 2006).
5 See University of the Witwatersrand History Workshop report, 'Myths, Monuments, Museums: New Premises',
South African Historical Journal, 27 (November 1992), pp. 225-42; C. Hamilton, 'Against the Museum as
Chameleon', South African Historical Journal, 31 (November 1994), pp. 184-90; E. Foner, '"We Must Forget
the Past": History in the New South Africa', South African Historical Journal, 32 (May 1995), pp. 163-76;
C. Kros, 'Heritage versus History: The End of a Noble Tradition?', Historia: Journal of the Historical
Association of South Africa, 48, 1 (May 2003), pp. 326-36.

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670 Journal of Southern African Studies

Inventing, Creating, or Imagining Botswana History and Heritage: The

Missionary Period
The kind of history envisaged within Boswa is predominantly one of legends and traditions.
Legends (dingwao) and tales or traditions of origins (polelo ya ditso) have existed for or at
least as long as there have been hereditary leaders around, anxious to legitimise themselves
by reference to ancestors. In the mid-nineteenth century, Kgosi Sechele of the BaKwena
preached from a pulpit in church, with the genealogy of his ancestors back to Lowe (Adam)
painted on the wall behind him.
London Missionary Society (LMS) missionaries, from John Philip and his Researches in
South Africa (1828) through John Mackenzie and his Ten Years North of the Orange River
(1871), showed great interest in the writing of recent history. Current research by Themba
Mgadla and Stephen Volz demonstrates the historical-cultural consciousness of LMS
evangelists and others writing for later nineteenth century Setswana newspapers.6 But the first
book to bring Tswana historical traditions together was, I believe, Three Great African
Chiefs: Kham?, Seb?le and Bathoeng, published on behalf of the LMS in 1895. It appears to
have been this book which, no doubt drawing from the three chiefs in question themselves, at
that time bound in close and equal alliance with each other, began the myth - still popularly
believed in Botswana but refuted by other recorded traditions - that the BaKwena,
BaNgwaketse and BaNgwato 'tribes' were descended from three eponymous brothers of the
same generation.7
The LMS published the first Tswana school history text in 1913, entitled Dinwao leha e le
Dipololelo kaga Dico tsa Secwana, compiled by the Rev. A. J. Wookey from the submissions
of district missionaries after consultation with local elders. The book consisted of the
traditional histories of 18 different peoples (including coloureds and Bakalanga), and was
reprinted eight times up to 1951, with a cumulative print-run of 23,000 copies. As a textbook
it served the LMS college at Tiger Kloof and tribal-owned elementary schools in Setswana
speaking areas of South Africa, as well as in Botswana.
Dico tsa Secwana 'created' the history of Tswana-speaking peoples as a coherent body of
knowledge to be passed on, as much by word of mouth as in writing. I remember talking with
wise old Tom Letso Kgosi, lying clad in pyjamas on his sick-bed at Sero we, about some or
other abstruse matter relating to the past. Tom suddenly sat up and said, 'What does history
say?', leaping gazelle-like to a bookshelf on the other side of his rondavel. He took down his
copy of Dico (or maybe it was Ditirafalo, see below) and enthusiastically read out a passage.
The publication of Dico tsa Secwana can be seen as a culminating moment in the LMS
Kuruman Press's publication of Setswana texts, which had begun with the New Testament 70
years before, and had progressed into translation of the whole Holy Bible, of Pilgrim's
Progress and of other devotional works, through newspapers into dictionaries and finally into
school texts with titles such as Arithmetiki and Geografi. (There was no corresponding need
yet to invent Histori.)
But the days of London Missionary Society dominance of Setswana education were
numbered, as independent 'tribal' schools were set up and colonial governments began to
'inspect' schools and control the curriculum. The once-rich LMS went into financial decline
from the period of the First World War onwards, as its Congregationalist backers in Britain
declined in prosperity.

6 Their volume of extracts from the 18 80s-90s newspaper Mahoko a Becwana is soon to be published by the Van
Riebeeck Society in Cape Town.
7 See N. Parsons, King Khama, Emperor Joe, and the Great White Queen: Victorian Britain through African Eyes
(Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press, 1998).

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 Unravelling History and Cultural Heritage in Botswana 671

'Progressive' missionaries such as W.C. Willoughby (founding principal at Tiger Kloof)

also began to reject the multi-tribalism and 'segregation' from mainstream colonial society
implicit in the Dico project. (By 1910, a traditionalist versus modernist debate was raging
among LMS missionaries in the Bechuanalands, in both theological and political terms.) Nor
was history still a cutting-edge scholarly discipline now that it was so widely accepted
in formal education. The missionary John Tom Brown, who had immense knowledge of
Setswana history, was persuaded by the anthropologist A.R. Radcliffe-Brown to turn his
memoirs, published in 1925, into a work of ethnology rather than history. Its inadequacy as an
account of highly settled rather than nomadic people was reflected in its title, Among the Bantu
Nomads... With the First Full Description of their Ancient Customs, Manners & Beliefs.
The publication and propagation of Dico tsa Secwana also underpinned the tribal
federalism of the Tswana chiefs, which can be traced back to the federal links of kinship and
marriage and trade, as well as combined resistance to Transvaal Boer expansionism in the
1850s. The finest moment of such resistance in combination was the joint delegation of
Khama, Sebele and Bathoen to the British government in London in 1895, to ward off
potential Rhodesian conquest at home.
After the First World War, very different works came from the pens of two Tswana
authors, S.M. Molema and Sol T. Plaatje. Overtly political in intent and written in English,
their books appealed to the heritage consciousness of a broad pan-African readership. Molema
published his Bantu Past and Present in 1920. Unlike his later works as a historian, it
mythologised the past rather than attempting to reconstruct it. More historical, though also
with a strong dose of mythology, was Plaatje's novel Mhudi, set in the 1830s and eventually
published in 1930.

Inventing, Creating, or Imagining Botswana History and Heritage: The

Early Colonial Period
Colonial governments had other ideas about the need for 'tribal' history. For purposes of
management and control they needed knowledge of chiefly genealogies and succession
among African rulers. The pioneer volume in this respect, overlapping into colonial
Botswana from South Africa, was The Native Tribes of the Transvaal [also published as A
Short History of...] published in two versions, one for Britain's War Office (1904) and the
other for the Transvaal Native Affairs Department (1905).
Around 1930, in line with the rationalisation of 'native administration' throughout British
Africa known as Indirect Rule, the call went out to Resident Magistrates/District
Commissioners to compile chieftainship-biased 'tribal' histories and ethnographies of their
districts. The call was answered with enthusiasm by more culturally aware colonial officers,
often themselves the sons or grandsons of missionaries.8 The result, for colonial Botswana,
was brought together by the anthropologist Isaac Schapera in two books published for the
Bechuanaland Protectorate Government by Lo v?dale Press in 1940: Ditirafalo tsa Merafhe
ya Batswana ha Lefatshe le Tshireletso (History of the Tribes of the Bechuanaland
Protectorate), and also Mekgwa le Melao y a Batswana (Customs and Laws of the Batswana).
Ditirafalo consisted of chapters by the colonial officers mentioned above, and by historically
minded anthropologists Isaac Schapera and Z.K. Matthews - another Motswana (actually
Motalaote) with affinities in both Botswana and South Africa. Mekgwa le Melao, on the other

8 See 'Colonel Rey and the Colonial Rulers of Botswana: Mercenary and Missionary Traditions in Administration,
1884-1955', in J.F. Ade Ajayi and J.D.Y. Peel (eds), People and Empires in African History: Essays in Memory
of Michael Crowder (London and New York, Longman, 1992), pp. 197-215.

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672 Journal of Southern African Studies

hand, consisted of 38 essays written by 17 different educated Batswana commissioned

by Schapera.
Thus, educated Batswana men, as well as missionaries and administrators, were able to shape
the heritage or Boswa of Botswana for passing down to subsequent generations. The historian
Barry Morton has argued that Chiefs (DiKgosi) Bathoen II and Tshekedi Khama and other
Tswana notables were able to turn the clock back, as informants on 'traditions' for Schapera's
restatements of Setswana law and custom - to reassert, for example, men's rights over women
previously liberated two generations earlier by Khama's Law (Melao yaga Khama).9 In the late
1990s, the Botswana press carried news of a man in a Molepolole court case who justified a man's
adultery, but not a woman's, by reference to the heritage he called Schapera's Law.
In the period between the two world wars, colonial administrators replaced missionaries
as the main external influence on 'tribal' administration and education. The chiefly proto
nationalism of tribal-federalism was institutionalised in the Native Advisory Council of 1920.
Tribal-federalism served as an ideology of combined resistance against incorporation by the
Union of South Africa in the late 1930s, and then in the 1940s supported massive wartime
military recruitment into the British Army (boycotting the South African Defence Force). The
chiefs, however, were undermined almost immediately the war ended by the renewal of
British plans to hand over the High Commission Territories (including colonial Botswana) to
South Africa. Wartime plans for post-war co-operation and development were dropped. As
Tshekedi told the African Advisory Council in early 1946:

Government has allowed to pass an opportunity for closer co-operation between Africans and
themselves. We are getting more and more dissatisfied with the policy of having everything
thought and done for us.10

Ditirafalo and Mekgwa, like Dico before them, contributed to tribal-federalism, but
unlike their predecessor they were limited to those 'tribes' or merafhe within Botswana
borders. As far as I can gather, by the Second World War the word Botswana, which can of
course in theory apply to all Tswana lands, was like its English equivalent 'Bechuanaland'
being applied in practice exclusively to mean only the land within modern Botswana borders.
The new director of education in the colonial administration, appointed in 1945, replaced
the study of local history, geography and culture by adopting instead the curriculum and
examinations of the Cape Province Native Syllabus.11 He rejected texts printed in 'old'
missionary orthographies in favour of those in the official Setswana orthography imposed
from Pretoria. These changes, together with the subsequent triumph of Bantu Education in
South Africa, which resulted in the closure of the LMS college for Batswana at Tiger Kloof,
helped to negate the heritage of mission literacy.

Inventing, Creating, or Imagining Botswana History and Heritage: The

Late Colonial Period
Between about 1946 and 1956 colonial Botswana was trapped in stasis as 'the country
without a future'. British plans to give colonial Botswana to South Africa, together with

9 See Pula: Botswana Journal of African Studies, 12, 1 & 2 (1998), and counter-view of Bojosi Otlhogile in 8, 2,
(1994).
10 Bechuanaland Protectorate, African Advisory Council, [Hansard] Verbatim Minutes of Debate, 27th Session, 25
April to 7 May 1946 - as cited in J.J. Zaffiro, From Police Network to Station of the Nation: A Political History of
Broadcasting in Botswana 1927-1991 (Gaborone, Botswana Society), p. 8.
11 See 'Education and Development in Pre-colonial and Colonial Botswana to 1965', in M. Crowder (ed.),
Education for Development in Botswana (Gaborone, Macmillan Boleswa for the Botswana Society, and
Basingstoke, Macmillan International, 1994), pp. 21-45.

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 Unravelling History and Cultural Heritage in Botswana 673

colonial Lesotho and Swaziland, were compromised because of the victory of the National
Party and apartheid in South Africa. These were also the years of international political
controversy over South African government objections to the marriage of Seretse Khama,
erupting in 1949-50 and not resolved until he was allowed back from exile in 1956.
Britain's political alternative to apartheid, called 'multi-racial partnership' (echoing wartime
propaganda), was floated instead in the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. Intermittent voices
in the 1950s called for Bechuanaland Protectorate to become part of that Federation, somewhat
along the lines of the Barotseland protectorate in Northern Rhodesia. (There was no question of
'mini-states' gaining eventual independence until after Cyprus became independent in 1960.)
The historian of the new order was Anthony Sillery, who published his book entitled The
Bechuanaland Protectorate in 1952. A shy former administrator turned Oxford academic, he
wrote in the tradition of Oxbridge imperial and colonial history. Sillery reconstructed the
narrative of a century and a half of British missionary and official contact with the Batswana. He
also appended - filling about half the book - nine chapters translating (although to what extent,
some future student of content analysis might establish) the Setswana 'tribal' histories of Dico
and Ditirafalo. Sillery's writing of history promoted the post-war colonial federalist ideals of
multi-tribalism and multi-racialism, though as an ex-Tanganyika Indirect Rule man he also stood
up for the country's separate protectorate identity from its white-settler neighbours.
The movement of ideas from tribal-federalism towards the unitary state may be studied
in the largely unpublished writings from the 1930s onwards of intellectuals such as Simon
Ratshosa, K.T. Motsete and L.D. Raditladi. Other pointers include, in the late 1940s, two
master's theses presented to Unisa (the University of South Africa) by Martinus Seboni and
Benjamin Thema, tracing the 'national' history of education in Bechuanaland. As for Tshekedi
Khama, his deposition from 'tribal' power in 1950 pushed his ideas (published by organisations
in London) through pan-tribal confederation towards some kind of unitary nationalism. It was
Kgosi Bathoen II, who had founded Botswana's first museum, at Kanye, around 1940, who
persuaded the colonial authorities to name 30th September as the country's national day.
This is not to say that either 'tribalism' or 'nationalism' were incompatible with pan
Africanism. Back in 1923, Kgosi Isang of the Bakgatla had tried to get Bechuanaland's
Native Advisory Council to adopt the constitution of South Africa's African National
Congress as its own. The young intellectuals who founded the Bamangwato National
Congress at Sero we in 1952 (and who later founded the Botswana People's Party, Botswana
Democratic Party, Botswana National Front, etc) were fully in tune with the African National
Congress movement in South Africa and the Rhodesias. As elsewhere in the region, the
national anthem of Botswana from at least the 1940s until the mid-1960s was Nkosi SikeleVi
Afrika, translated with Setswana words as Kgosi Segofatsa Afrika. (Whatever may have
happened in the 1960s, as nation-states began to be balkanised by independence, there was a
regional or sub-continental congress movement in the 1940s-50s.)12
We might say that Histori rather than dingwao or boswa had at last arrived with nationalism
and concomitant intellectual culture. Ironically it was to be expressed in English, accepted
universally as the language of advanced literacy. As educators then discovered and publishers
still complain today, Setswana (and other 'mother tongues') might be appropriate for the
acquisition of basic literacy, and for the lower ranks of primary schools. But people expected to
read more advanced material in English - even though the actual spoken language of the new
elites was a form of 'code switching' between Setswana and English. This new, hybrid culture
laid the groundwork for heritage studies and the heritage 'industry' : by alienating people from
vaguely-defined notions of previous Boswa, while simultaneously creating a great nostalgia

12 See Seretse Khama, 1921-1980 (Gaborone, Botswana Society & Johannesburg, Macmillan Boleswa, 1995).

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674 Journal of Southern African Studies

for it as a well-defined object of desire. (This applies to both the generation that came of age
around independence and to the next generation in the twentieth century; it remains to be seen
how far it applies at the beginning of the 21st century to the present fully-globalised cellphone
generation, many of whom use English as their primary tongue.)

Inventing, Creating, or Imagining Botswana History and Heritage: The

Post-independence Period
Independence came to Botswana with little international fanfare in 1966, against a
background of drought and possibly the worst poverty in Africa. The new national anthem
was a hymn written by the oldest opposition nationalist. The flag was designed by an
expatriate bureaucrat; its azure blue bleached so quickly in the sun that most people today
assume that grey-blue is the correct national colour.
Nothing much happened until 1969, when momentous turning points were reached in the
development of a unitary state. The renegotiation of the southern African customs in 1969,
conceding revenues proportionate to national imports and exports, rather than a very low fixed
share of gross regional customs income, made possible the deficit financing of copper and
diamond mining infrastructure in Central (Bangwato) District. Without the voluntary concession
of all mineral rights to the state by the Bangwato in 1969, setting a precedent for when minerals
were found elsewhere, Botswana could have become a cockpit for competing 'tribalisms' as one
district outpaced all others in modern development. It was also in 1969 that Kgosi Bathoen II
(Tshekedi having died in 1959) finally realised that the chiefs had been tricked (back in 1964) out
of all chance of a tribal-federal House of Lords with real powers in government.
Until around 1969-70, when economic development began to take off, Botswana was
barely noticed by the outside world and its people displayed relatively little pride in their
country or culture. Nor, given the fact that the capital city had only been founded in 1964,
were there many national institutions to speak of. The national war memorial,
commemorating the two World Wars, was not unveiled until 20 years after 1945. The
post-1968 beginnings of a national museum, devoted to history and ecology, were the
personal achievement of the head of the wildlife department (Alec Campbell) in collaboration
with Bathoen II. These two men also founded the Botswana Society, which for the next 20
years acted as a semi-scientific think-tank for new government policies, emphasising
environment and heritage. Its annual publication, Botswana Notes and Records, was and is
still the main record of scholarship and research on Botswana.
Gaborone did not have a university campus until 1971-72. But a new breed of university
trained historians, led by Thomas Tlou, emerged from the African Studies boom of North
America and Europe to assert the African nature of Botswana's past. Tlou began a tradition of
undergraduate historical dissertations to fill the yawning gaps of history. Campbell and others
extended research into prehistory and archaeology. By the later 1970s and 1980s, the idea of a
united Botswana nation had become sacrosanct, forged in the white heat of mass response to
incursions and state terrorism emanating from Rhodesia and South Africa. But a new
generation of students and visiting scholars plunged into revaluation of the past, ignoring or
rejecting the shibboleths of the conventional past, and searching for non-Tswana roots and
previously neglected 'resisters' like the Bakalanga leader John Nswazwi who defied the rule
of Kgosi Tshekedi Khama, now vilified as a 'collaborator' with colonialism.13

13 More recently there has been a counter-attack on behalf of Tshekedi in the form of Gasebalwe Seretse, Tshekedi
Khama: The Master Whose Dogs Barked at [Him] (A Critical Look at Ngwato Politics) (Gaborone, The Author,
2004).

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 Unravelling History and Cultural Heritage in Botswana 675

The Setswana heritage of Dico and Ditirafalo was neglected in favour of the excellent
archival and oral records now available. Tribal-federalism had by now been entirely replaced
by one-nation ideology, based on the assumption that unification of a national state could be
projected back deep into the past. It was Anthony Sillery who had actually provided the first
national history in one volume, Botswana: A Short Political History (1974), but this and other
works by Sillery were regarded by young scholars as advocating a colonial heritage that
needed to be rejected. Thomas Tlou and Alec Campbell produced the next and only subsequent
national history, History of Botswana (1983, since revised), reflecting much of the new
scholarship - and inserting a historical component into otherwise unhistorical social studies.

Botswana History and Heritage Today

After 30 years of breakneck economic growth and external political threats, Botswana society
matured and developed middle-aged spread in the regional peace of the 1990s. The country then
celebrated the new millennium by a consumer boom of shopping malls and property speculation
and other evidence of the rise of a local but globalised petty-bourgeoisie. With the promotion of
citizen-owned tourism as one of the aims of the current National Development Plan (NDP-IX), the
times are ripe for the 'selling' of heritage at local district level to national and international tourists.
There is now an annual heritage calendar of festivals that kicks off in March-April with
the Maitisong festival of plays and performances in Gaborone, and the Wayeyi harvest
festival at Gumare in the northwest, and continues with the Tjilenge festival of Bakalanga
dancing and foods in northeast district during May. July sees traditional dancing displays
from around the country on President's Day and a National Eisteddfod of massed choirs at
Selebi-Phikwe. The Kuru (Basarwa) dance festival takes place around fires in the cold night
of the western desert in August. The coming of warm weather in September is celebrated by
the so-called Kalahari jazz festival in Gaborone, and by two more festivals celebrating
Bakalanga culture and traditions - at Domboshaba (Zimbabwe-type ruins) in October and at
Francistown (the Dzalobana festival) in November. Although open to all comers, the Wayeyi,
Basarwa and Bakalanga festivals all celebrate non-Tswana identity, and it may be expected
that more such festivals will emerge with the rise of both tourism and ethnic associations.
Such cultural festivals have proved considerably more popular with economical black
tourists than super-expensive wildlife safaris, which are patronised by rich visitors - notably
whites from northern Johannesburg. As if in recognition of this, the Mokolodi nature reserve,
next to 'some of the most imposing mansions where Gaborone's tycoons reside', has drawn on
Norwegian aid and combined with local villagers in a community trust to open a highly
successful lodge and 'cultural village' called Majaka-thatha on a hill next to Mmankgodi, about
30 km away by road. Hundreds of local weekend visitors can affordably stay the day and night,
consuming modern drink and traditional foods under thatched roofs while watching massed
traditional dancing and the manufacture of handicrafts.14 (In common with South Africa and
Namibia the last decade has seen the opening of numerous bed-and-breakfast lodges along
main roads, often advertising local cultural tours - aimed at citizen as well as foreign clientele.)
One of the most remarkable features of the past 20 years has been the rise and official
encouragement of primary and secondary school 'traditional' dancing groups, which now appear
on national television and engage in annual national competitions. (The standard male and
female dances have yet to be properly studied, but appear to derive from Korana precedents.)15

14 Daily News (Gaborone), 12 February 2002.

15 See under 'Korana' in P.R. Kirby, The Musical Instruments of the Native Races of South Africa (Johannesburg,
Witwatersrand University Press, [2nd edition] 1968).

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676 Journal of Southern African Studies

This has in turn stimulated the production of standard 'traditional' leather dress, and the stringing
of seedpod leg rattles, which complements the local sewing of school uniforms. More adult
groups hire themselves out to dance at weddings and open-air picnics; one such group featured in
a thirteen-part drama series called Re Bina Mmogo aired on Botswana television in late 2005.
Botswana is a multi-ethnic state, which has been in the past unusually successful in
presenting a mono-ethnic identity to itself and to the world. Although no ethnic counting has
been permitted since the census of 1946, people of 'true' Tswana origin may not even be the
biggest minority. (There have always been many more such Tswana in South Africa than in
Botswana.) However, the post-independence government has always insisted on referring to
all citizens of Botswana as 'Batswana'. President Festus Mogae, although (like more than one
of his cabinet) he comes from the BaTalaote group of Bakalanga, is insistent in calling
himself a Motswana and a Mongwato (singular of BaNgwato, one of the eight officially
recognised Tswana 'tribes'). Government officials are fond of citing the non-racial and anti
tribal policies of former President Khama as the key to Botswana's political success, and are
loath to abandon the formula. (In a recent interview, the retired second president, Ketumile
Masire, admitted that at independence he and Seretse Khama wanted the eventual elimination
of tribal chieftainship.) But the leaders of ethnic associations argue that the unitary state
is now secure enough from the bane of 'tribalism' to tolerate the pressing of non-Tswana
cultural-linguistic heritages.16
With the death of apartheid and of divide-and-rule tribal Bantustans in South Africa, sub
national ethnicities have been promoted by international agencies and have become
intellectually respectable once again in the subcontinent. In Botswana, 'reasonable radicals'
at the centre of political power have pressed the interests of non-Tswana ethnicities. They
have campaigned for local radio broadcasting and lower primary education in their own
languages. The key demand has been reform of that part of the constitution which recognises
only eight old colonial 'tribal reserves', and gives only their 'pure' Tswana paramount chiefs
the automatic right to sit in the House of Chiefs (Nth y a Dikgosi).17
Constitutional amendments to expand the House of Chiefs have been presented by
government for popular discussion, and have bogged down in debate as exactly how new
chieftainships should be included. Opposition politicians have called for the replacement of
the House of Chiefs by a Senate representing special interest groups as well as ethnicities. The
National Broadcasting Board can, in theory, issue licences for local vernacular radio, but the
Ministry of Education has firmly resisted the principle of local language instruction in lower
primary schools, sticking doggedly to Setswana as being the 'mother tongue' of everyone.
Meanwhile, the 'reasonable radicals' have recruited a valuable ally in the United Nations
Special Committee on Racial Discrimination, which produced a report in March 2006
requiring the Botswana government to right its wrongs, starting with the counting of ethnic
population groups, by the year 2009.18
The UN's Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (formerly on
Apartheid) called the government of Botswana to account in its observations published on 21
March 2006. After congratulating the government on its timeous reporting, its frankness and

16 See Journal of South African Studies (JSAS), 28, 4 (December 2002), 'Special Issue: Minorities, Difference and
Tribal Citizenship in Botswana'.
17 See R.P. Werbner, Reasonable Radicals and Citizenship in Botswana: The Political Anthropology ofKalanga
Elites (Bloomington, IN, Indiana University Press, 2004).
18 United Nations, International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of racial Discrimination, Committee
on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, Sixty-Eighth Session, 20 February-10 March 2006: Document
CERD/C/BWA/CO/16 dated 21 March 2006 (Original in English, for General Distribution), Consideration or
Reports Submitted by States Parties under Article 9 of the Convention: Concluding Observations of the
Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination: BOTSWANA, paras 1-28 (considering the 15th and 16th
periodic reports of Botswana submitted as CERD/C/495/Add. 1).

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 Unravelling History and Cultural Heritage in Botswana 677

its acknowledgment of 'the existence of on-going debates at the domestic level', the
committee proceeded to castigate the government on a number of counts on its
implementation of the UN Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. The
committee gave the Botswana government three years in which to achieve the following:

provide 'more precise information on the ethnic and linguistic composition of the
population',
adopt UN standard definitions of racial discrimination,
extend non-discrimination on ethnic grounds into customary ('tribal') law,
protect 'ethnic and cultural diversity' and recognise 'the existence of indigenous peoples
on its territory',
take into account how ethnic groups, particularly indigenous people, 'perceive and define
themselves',
ensure 'the participation of all ethnic groups in the House of Chiefs on an equal basis',
amend the Chieftainship and Tribal Territories Acts as well as the Constitution,
negotiate with 'the residents of the [Central Kalahari Game] Reserve, including those who
have been relocated', using a 'rights-based approach' to recognise land rights, economic
rights, and rights to 'prior free and informed consent' for any relocation,
provide legal (financial) aid and language interpretation to access law courts for 'poor
people' and 'persons belonging to the most disadvantaged ethnic groups',
adopt into school curricula 'knowledge of the history, culture and traditions' of 'non
Tswana ethnic groups'.

Other criticisms targeted police discrimination without redress against foreign residents,
asylum seekers, refugees and 'undocumented immigrants', and the recommendation that an
independent national human rights body be established.
The UN committee's report came after particularly strong lobbying by non-government
organisations (NGOs), notably from Kamanakao, the Wayeyi ethnic association headed by
Professor Lydia Nyati-Ramahobo, Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Students Affairs at the
University of Botswana.19 People like her seek a radical change in recognition of ethnic and
linguistic rights, but do not challenge the international legitimacy of the Botswana
government or the territorial integrity of the Botswana state, and have thus been dubbed
'reasonable radicals'.
A significant number of Bakalanga benefited from the pre-independence education
system, alongside the families of Tswana chiefs and headmen, and thus became a major part
of the 'bureaucratic bourgeoisie' that benefited from post-colonial economic development. In
the 1950s, Botswana's Bakalanga youths may have looked to Zimbabwe, and to the
leadership of Joshua Nkomo, but became increasingly differentiated from Zimbabwe's
Bakalanga due to the events of the next few decades. Their quarrel had been with the
Bangwato chiefs (notably Tshekedi Khama, who ruled 1926-50), rather than with Batswana
per se. Thus, Gobe Matenge, the most notable 'reasonable radical' identified by Richard
Werbner, was and is undoubtedly a Botswana loyalist. He was not only a leading light of the
Botswana Civil Servants' Association from the moment of independence but later for many
years chaired the Botswana Society, the body promoting scientific and cultural knowledge
nationwide.

19 T. Setsiba, 'Interview: The Cultural Warrior [Lydia Nyati-Ramahobo]', Mmegi (Gaborone), 19 January 2006,
p. 5. See also O.D. Selolwane, 'Ethnic Structure, Inequality and Governance of the Public Sector: Botswana Case
Study', paper for United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), March 2004, available at
www.unrisd.org/unrisd/website/document.nsf, retrieved on 10-15 April 2006.

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678 Journal of Southern African Studies

The main organisation for Bakalanga cultural interests has been the Society for the
Promotion of Ikalanga Language (SPIL). Its educated elite origins are indicated by its title
being in English. Since the year 2000, SPIL has held an annual festival next to the
Domboshaba historic site near the Zimbabwe border 'to promote the Bakalanga culture, to
celebrate their history, and to teach how they are related to each other and to their chiefs'. The
festival has promoted distinctive traditional dancing during the day and the telling of
traditional tales at night, and the organisers have openly welcomed participants regardless of
ethnic origin.20
The Kamanakao Association represents the interests of Wayeyi people in Ngamiland.
It grew out of a long tradition of resistance by the local Wayeyi majority against their
minority Tswana rulers, and initially focused on the creation of a Wayeyi paramount
chieftainship. Other ethnic associations both student and adult, such as those for Batswapong,
Babirwa, Bakhalagari, Ovaherero and (separately) Ovambanderu, have had much less public
exposure and political impact in Botswana than SPIL or Kamanakao. (Although protests in
2006 against the Nigerian-style zombie-thriller television series, Thokolosi, set in the
Babirwa capital of Bobonong, have aroused Babirwa passions against being nationally
libelled as practitioners of witchcraft. Its director, from Serowe and thus of 'pure Tswana
breed', has been accused of using the Babirwa minority group as 'comical relief and stress
busting baby oil'.)21
These ethnic associations challenge but pose no fundamental threat to the status quo in
Botswana, and thus have been ignored by the international media. They demand only cultural
rights and political representation in the House of Chiefs or Senate, and not economic rights -
and thus pose no long-term threat to the power and wealth in which their leaders presently
share. The case of the Basarwa (Khoe and San) of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve
(CKGR) is, however, an entirely different matter, and has provoked extreme intolerance in
ruling circles. Wildlife preserves (with the exception of the Moremi initiated by a 'tribe' on
tribal land) and all subsoil mineral rights (since the 1969 Bangwato precedent for Central
District) are regarded as inalienable national property contributing to central state income.
The recognition of separate Basarwa social and economic rights over the CKGR, notably the
diamond rights for which their foreign supporters are pressing (with suspect motives), would
undermine the principle of non-tribal national assets upon which Botswana's prosperity has
been built. The demands made on behalf of present and former CKGR inhabitants by the
British-based organisation Survival International have been dubbed, reportedly in a Botswana
cabinet meeting of late 2004, as the major threat to the nation's future security. Survival
has campaigned for international sanctions against Botswana diamonds and boycotts of its
tourism.22

20 Werbner, Reasonable Radicals, passim; 'Domboshaba Festival Next Month', Daily News (Gaborone), 11
October 2001.
21 For Wayeyi see L. Nyati-Ramahobo, 'From a Phone Call to the High Court: Wayeyi Visibility and the
Kamanakao Association's Campaign for Linguistic and Cultural Rights in Botswana', Journal of Southern
African Studies (JSAS), 28,4 (December 2002), pp. 685-709; for Batswapong see P. Motsafi-Haller, Fragmented
Worlds, Coherent Lives: The Politics of Difference in Botswana (Westport, Conn., Bergin & Garvey, 2002); for
Ovambanderu see 'Mbanderu in a Cultural Conference', Midweek Sun (Gaborone), 12 April 2006; for Babirwa
see, 'Thokolosi Causes Uproar', Mmegi, 9 March 2006; K. Dipholo, letter to editor ?Thokolosi More Worth than
Babirwa?'), Mmegi, 12 April 2006.
22 'Mogae Admits Helplessness against Survival International', Sunday Standard (Gaborone), 2 October 2005, p. 4.
See also R.K. Hitchcock, 'We are the First People: Land, Natural Resources and Identity in the Central Kalahari,
Botswana', JSAS, 28, 4 (December 2002), pp. 797-824; A.K. Segobye, 'Divided Commons: The Political
Economy of Southern Africa's Cultural Heritage Landscapes - Observations of the Central Kalahari Game
Reserve, Botswana', University of Botswana: UB/Tromso Basarwa Studies seminar series paper, 19 April 2006.
The latter paper considers the CKGR within the broader theme of intellectual property and indigenous knowledge
systems of marginalised communities.

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 Unravelling History and Cultural Heritage in Botswana 679

The main Basarwa ethnic association, called First People of the Kalahari, under the
leadership of Roy Sesana, has become obsessed with the CKGR, to the detriment of issues
concerning the greater and more widespread population of Basarwa in Botswana, as raised by
its previous but since deceased leader, Oxford-educated John Hardbattle:

John Hardbattle would not have allowed the drive for change to be so narrowed that the outside
world's concern is fixated on one small place and one small community at the expense of so many
impoverished, powerless others living in different parts of the country.23

Hence, advocacy of Basarwa human and cultural rights is at present split between the
CKGR-focused militance of Survival International and First People of the Kalahari on the
one hand, and the more wide-ranging but accommodationist (originally Christian missionary)
Kuru Development Trust in the Western Kalahari and the (originally largely feminist)
Ditshwanelo Centre for Human Rights in Gaborone.24
Government quarters continue to insist on maintaining Botswana/Motswana/Batswana/
Setswana as the national identity of all citizens. Albeit imposed from outside, by the former
Organisation of African Unity, the Botswana government happily conferred the status of
Motswana on the remains of a man 'repatriated' to Botswana from Spain in the year 2000.
Best known in Spain as El Negro, but latterly claimed to be II Bosquimano (the Bushman), his
body had originally been exhumed from the Northern Cape of South Africa by French
taxidermists in the 1820s and taken to France and exhibited under the name of Le Betjouana
(i.e. Tswana). The arrival of some of his body parts in a small ossuary box and its burial in a
Gaborone park caused a local sensation, although the burial site has been neglected until
recently when talk of a statue to mark the spot was revived.25
There has also been evidence of a Tswana backlash, trying to defend and promote the
interests of 'true' Tswana people who can trace ancestry to the Kwena, Kgatla and Rolong
dynasties of yore. In the late 1980s there was much talk of a group of businessmen known as
Leno objecting to Kalanga-cum-Asian dominance of new land holdings and industrial
commercial operations in the capital city of Gaborone. It was said that Leno was trying to
reserve a new central business district (CBD), to be built on black cotton soil west of the
railway line, for itself. The Kalanga advocate-anthropologist Richard Werbner has made fun
of a loose ethnic association named Pitso y a Batswana, spearheaded by the journalist
Methaetsile Leepile, which coalesced in 2001 to defend the privilege of Setswana culture and
the eight Tswana 'tribes' in the House of Chiefs.26
The Three Chiefs, Kings or Dikgosi-Khama, Sebele, and Bathoen-had been given the
soubriquet of 'Founders of the Nation' (in the government magazine Kutlwano) at the time of
independence in 1966. The eventual (though not immediate) success of their 1895 political
delegation to London, in maintaining the autonomy of the state from absorption by other
states, made them the central historical figures of Tswana tribal-federalism - and they were

23 S. Grant, 'Etcetera II: Power and Vulnerability', Monitor (Gaborone), 27 March 2006, p. 11.
24 For Kuru see www.kuru.co.bw/dancefestival.htm; 'Kuru Festival Helps to Socialise Basarwa Community', Daily
News (Gaborone, 13 August 2001); for Ditshwanelo, 'the Botswana Centre for Human Rights', see
www.ditshwanelo.org.bw retrieved on 10-15 April 2006; for an attack on Kuru and Ditshwanelo see First People
of the Kalahari Press release, 'Radio Show about Bushmen was not True', 22 November 2005, available on
www.survival-international.org/related_material.php7id = 31, retrieved on 10-15 April 2006.
25 N. Parsons and A.K. Segobye, 'Missing Persons and Stolen Bodies: The Repatriation of El Negro to Botswana',
in C. Fforde, J. Hubert and P. Turnbull (eds), The Dead and their Possessions: Reparations in Principle, Policy
and Practice (London, Routledge, 2002), pp. 245-55; N. Parsons, 'One Body Playing Many Parts - le
Betjouana, el Negro, and il Bosquimano', Pula: Botswana Journal of African Studies (special issue on 'El Negro
and the Hottentot Venus'), 16, 1 (2002), pp. 19-29; M. Gaotlhobogwe, 'El Negro Gets Face Lift', Monitor, 10
April 2006, p. 4.
26 R.P. Werbner, 'Cosmopolitan Ethnicity, Entrepreneurship and the Nation: Minority Elites in Botswana', JSAS,
28, 4 (December 2002), pp. 751-53.

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680 Journal of Southern African Studies

subsequently adopted as icons of unitary nationalism advocating renewed independence. The

idea of commemorating them in public statuary was first proposed by the House of Chiefs in
1990. Gaborone, as an almost entirely postcolonial city, is lacking in statues, even by
comparison with Maseru, which boasts a bronze statue of Moshoeshoe I, as the founder of the
Lesotho nation.
State funds were first allocated for the Three Dikgosi Monument in 1997-98, but were
considered inadequate and were not spent because of the objections of town planners to every
site for the monument proposed by an advisory committee sitting in the National Museum.
Formal application for a site in the Main Mall was rejected in 2001. Greater funds were then
allocated and four tenders were received from sculptors in early 2003, and a plot was
allocated to the monument in the new Central Business District - still planned but unbuilt on
the western side of the railway. The most interesting-looking of the four bids was that of
Masilonyane Radinoga, showing the three kings gesticulating and consulting among
themselves, but the advisory committee chose the most monumental bid, by the Mansudae
Overseas Project, of three immensely tall soldier-like figures, standing straight-backed with
heads uplifted and staring into the future. Mansudae was a North Korean company with its
own sculpture workshop in Windhoek, and a considerable track record in southern Africa: it
designed the Heroes' Acres of Harare and Windhoek, as well as South Africa's Freedom Park
and a Mandela statue in a Northern Johannesburg shopping centre.
The awarding of such a fat contract (initially P7 million, eventually P10 million) to a
foreign organisation, overlooking other sculptors who could do more for less, caused
controversy, as did the supposed re-imposition of Tswana historical hegemony at a time when
so many minorities were reclaiming their own heritages. There was much talk in newspapers
and on radio chat-shows, and much historical confusion as 1885 (when an unwanted or
unwonted British protectorate was imposed) was conflated with 1895 when the three dikgosi
went to London. Perhaps the most historically salient question asked was whether they were
really fighting for the future of the whole country or just looking after their own interests?27
When unveiling the Three Dikgosi Monument on 3 October 2005, President Mogae said
that their mission to London in 1895 was often misunderstood. 'Contrary to popular belief,
they did not travel to request Queen Victoria's protection against just the Boers, but against
the greater threat of white settler rule... a more powerful adversary than any Boer - namely
the rich and ruthless Cecil John Rhodes.' He remarked on the paradox that 'for many decades,
nationalist-minded Batswana were more often outspoken as advocates of continued imperial,
as opposed to settler regime control, than the very imperialists themselves'.
Batsani Ndaba, chairperson of SPIL and of Reteng - the umbrella organisation of ethnic
associations in Botswana - was not impressed by Mogae's historical corrections. He said that
the celebration could only be for 'the tribes associated with the chiefs' : as there was 'nothing
for minorities to celebrate about the three chiefs going to England to seek protection. They
did not go voluntarily. They were summoned.... protection was imposed on them'.28
The three tall thin golden-coloured North Korean figures are today visible from the
nearby railway flyover, standing Ozymandias-like in the boundless and bare CBD.

27 N. Parsons to T. Mpulubusi (Director National Museum), 8 May 1997; S.T. Mogotsi (National Museum) to
N. Parsons, 2 November 2004 (copies in author's possession); 'Discussion on the 3-chiefs Monument', Edumela
chatroom! 20 February to 19 May 2004, www.edumela.com/edm_forum; 'Dikgosi Monument to Cost P10.5m',
Daily News (Gaborone), 13 January 2005. See also Q.N. Parsons, 'The Image of Khama the Great - 1868 to
1970', Botswana Notes and Records, 3 (1971), pp. 40-58; Parsons, King Khama, Emperor Joe, and the Great
White Queen.
28 'Mogae Pays Tribute to Three Dikgosi', Daily News, 3 October 2005; 'Tribal Undertones Plague Statues
Unveiling', Sunday Standard (Gaborone), 2 October 2005, p. 4 and photo on p. 1; 'Dikgosi Monument Becomes
Instant Attraction', Monitor (Gaborone), 3 October 2005, p. 18; M. Radinoga, 'The Truth about the Chiefs
Monument', reader's letter to Mmegi, 14 October 2005, p. 25.

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 Unravelling History and Cultural Heritage in Botswana 681

Conclusion
What is the future of heritage in Botswana? This article has been largely concerned with
heritage perceived within the nation-state, and with the reassertion of the heritage of local
ethnicities, rather than with the heritage image of Botswana perceived at global or regional
(sub-continental) levels.
The global image of the nation-state of Botswana has come of age in the new millennium
as a complex bundle of both good and bad. Back in the 1950s, impoverished and resourceless
colonial Botswana was described as the 'country without a future', a desert land populated by
Bushmen. In the 1960s the new nation was perceived as exclusively occupied by Tswana
people and was given the classical tag: 'Happy is the nation that has no history. By this
standard there can be few nations in Africa happier than Bechuanaland...' (After her arrival in
the country's largest town, the novelist Bessie Head wrote: 'There isn't anything in this
village that an historian might care to write about... Historians do not write about people and
how strange and beautiful they are - just living.')
Botswana's global image was then radically changed by diamonds in the 1970s and by
regional politics in the 1980s, to become that of a prosperous - to quote Pope John Paul II -
'island of peace in a troubled sea'. However, during the 1990s, Botswana was abandoned by
major western donors and its image of good governance was overtaken by newly liberated
South Africa. The country was cruelly re-branded as the oppressor of Kalahari Bushmen
(Basarwa) and home of the world's worst HIV/AIDS epidemic. This image has since been
softened by the success of Batswana women in international beauty competitions (notably
Mpule Kwelagobe as the first Miss Universe of African descent in 1999) and by the
worldwide popularity of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series of novels by Alexander
McCall Smith, portraying the good heart of Botswana society.29
The heritage of any single country, however, is both much broader and much narrower
than the collective heritage of the nation-state, however tempting and touristic it is to lump all
local cultures and customs together as local variants of national culture and customs.30
Virtually every local ethnicity within Botswana has strong continuities across modern
borders. The past half century has seen the dissolution of such ethnic affiliations by national
loyalties, but the next half century bids to see their regrowth - as the Southern African
Development Community (or at least its Southern African Customs Union component
of Botswana-Lesotho-Namibia-South Africa-Swaziland) brings states together into a closer
union which dissolves borders.
International tourists also see the world as one of subcontinental regions, with little regard
for national boundaries. They desire and expect freedom of movement between the four
countries that converge near Victoria Falls, and can see no reason why the Northern Cape of
South Africa should have a David Livingstone Trail unconnected elsewhere. Such linkages
open up great possibilities for regional networks of local tourism that cross borders -
although this begs the question as to how local tourist development can benefit whole
communities rather than just a few entrepreneurs.

29 Classical tag quoted by B.A. Young, Bechuanaland (London, Her Majesty's Stationery Office, Colonial Office
Corona Series No. X, 1966), p. 121; B. Head, 'For Serowe, a Village in Africa', New African, 4, 10 (December
1965), p. 230; Pope John Paul II quoted during a September 1989 stop-over in Botswana in D. Mercer (ed.),
Chronicle for the Year 1988 (London, Chronicle Communications/ Longman, 1989), p. 108; Encyclopaedia
entries for 'Miss Universe' and 'Alexander McCall Smith' available at www.wikipedia.org retrieved on 10-15
April 2006.
30 See J. Denbow and P.C. Thebe, Culture and Customs of Botswana (Westport, Conn., Greenwood Press, Culture
and Customs of Africa, 2006).

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682 Journal of Southern African Studies

Lastly, there is the challenge to scholarly historians and archaeologists of cultural and
'natural' heritage being marketed as unchanging 'traditions', or the past without time
perspective. Indeed, Botswana's prosperity as a nation-state is closely tied to the marketing of
timeless global heritage in the slogan 'Diamonds Are Forever'. How can scholars challenge
the customers of heritage: not just to consume a prepackaged frozen past, but also to question
what they see within the context of scholarly debate? Heritage may well be the hidden hand
that ultimately feeds historians and archaeologists, but that is no reason not to bite it
occasionally.

Neil Parsons
Department of History, University of Botswana, Private Bag 0022, Gaborone, Botswana.
E-mail: nparsons@mopipi.ub.bw

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