THE STATE AND THE SOCIAL
State Formation in Botswana andIts Pre-Colonial and Colonial Genealogies
Ørnulf Gulbrandsen
Published in 2012 by
Berghahn Books
©2012 Ørnulf GulbrandsenFirst ebook edition published in 2012 All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passagesfor the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this bookmay be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic ormechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any informationstorage and retrieval system now known or to be invented,without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gulbrandsen, The state and the social : state formation in Botswana and its pre-colonial and colonial / 01 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-0-85745-297-9 (hardback)ISBN 978-0-85745-298-6 (ebook)
For Elsa
CONTENTS
Chapter 1. The Development of Tswana Merafe and the Arrival of Christianity and Colonialism
Chapter 3. Cattle, Diamonds and the ‘Grand Coalition’
Chapter 5. Tswana Domination, Minority Protests and the Discourse of Development
Chapter 6. Antipolitics and Questions of Democracy and Domination
Chapter 7. Governmentalization of the State: On State Interventions in the Population
Chapter 8. Escalating Inequality: Popular Reactions to Political Leaders
MAPS
Map 1. Sketch map of Bechuanaland Protectorate
Map 2. Map of the Republic of Botswana
ILLUSTRATIONS
Illustration 1. Robert Moffat, the first LMS missionary to visit the Bangwaketse royal town (1824), preaching to a Tswana local community.
Illustration 2. ‘Battles outside Shoshong’ as rendered by LMS missionary John Mackenzie (1883: 246).
Illustration 3. Regent of Bangwato, Kgosi Tshekedi (left) and Kgosi Bathoen II (right) of Bangwaketse
Illustration 4. The initiates arrive in the royal kgotla of the Bakgatla as the final stage of the bogwera in 1982.
Illustration 5. Kgosi Kgafela in ritual attire leading the ceremonial procession to his enthronement in the royal kgotla in Mochudi (2008) attended by thousands of Bakgatla from Botswana and South Africa.
Illustration 6. The Bangwaketse royal kgotla with the old office of the kgosi.
Illustration 7. The new office of the kgosi and his tribal administration; the building also includes a courtroom – meaning that the proceedings might take place indoors, which is an entirely new practice.
Illustration 8. Villagers encounter state officials in a village kgotla.
FOREWORD
This volume presents an anthropological discussion of the socio-historical emergence of the Botswana nation-state. Gulbrandsen, in the best tradition of anthropological field research, adopts a holistic perspective grounded in ethnographic experience and immersion in a diversity of social and political practices over the long-term. This is not the kind of travelogue ethnography that has begun to take a hold in anthropology, one perhaps over-influenced by postmodern cultural studies perspectives.
Gulbrandsen's observations and interpretations build from his engagement beginning in the 1970s with predominantly members of the Tswana majority, and in a great variety of contexts involving many different subject positions. The conceptual and theoretical understandings that he develops are conditional on his ethnography which is the hallmark of an anthropological approach. Here I must remark that in my opinion anthropology is not theory-driven and that this constitutes its distinction in the social sciences. That is, while anthropologists claim major theoretical significance for their work, their theoretical understanding is empirically derived (rather than merely empirically supported) and is ideally organic with the life situations examined. In this sense, anthropological theorizing does not begin in abstraction or in some transcendent authority, but in and through the grounded experience of human practice. Anthropology gives this primacy and it is in this sense that Gulbrandsen's work achieves its distinction. I say this because much of Gulbrandsen's argument – indeed its excitement – develops through a critical consideration of major conceptual and theoretical orientations in the economic, political and social sciences especially as they are applied to Africa. These have their source in European and North American contexts (in fact in the particular historical conditions of specific modernities and reflections upon them). As an anthropologist, Gulbrandsen is intensely sensitive to this fact and, more specifically, of his own Norwegian origins which bear certain assumptions that demand addressing in the Botswana context. For example, he is concerned with dimensions of democratic practice in Botswana noting some similarities with Norway where the emphasis on local participation is emphasised especially through its commune system (not unlike that of Switzerland studied by Eric Wolf). In Norway there is a strong stress on a politics of consensus, at both local and national levels, and this attunes Gulbrandsen to similar dynamics in the Botswana context although as he demonstrates this emerges from