For long, I had taken very East African and, I am ashamed to say, elitist eyes to Botswana. I had done the art exhibitions, the monuments, and other “upper deck” people things like those.
On another sojourn there this week, I swore to “get on the ground”.
The company of some rowdy East Africans helped on this adventure. We asked to be shown “where ordinary people live,” our delicate way of requesting to be shown a slum.
Some of the chaps decided that you can never know the ordinary people in Africa, unless you taste what they drink. We piled into a van and were taken to a slum, which turned out to be a place called Old Naledi (Old Star). Again, with a Nairobi mindset, we were waiting to get to a place that looks like Mathare or Kibera.
There was no Kibera or Mathare. Old Naledi is a passable low-cost working-class neighbourhood, not a slum. Our ideas of what a slum is turned out to be very different.
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That done, we went looking for a South African style shebeen, for the boys to taste the East African equivalent of busaa, kwete or tonto. The bar was a passable little place with a pool table. The busaa they brought is chibuku, more popularly known as Shake Shake. It is industrially produced, and not the harsh type that can kill or make you blind. The boys were not fazed by it at all.
But our East African bubble hadn’t yet burst. The moment came quickly, though. We didn’t have change in the Botswana currency, the pula, to pay for the chibuku. We asked the woman who owns the joint to send a lad, who seemed like her son, to come with us to the vehicle where we had the change. The lad asked where we were from. Kenya, came the reply. Nope, he had never heard of Kenya. Nairobi? No, he hadn’t heard of it either. If nothing else, his ignorance helped us appreciate just how big and diverse Africa is.
It was also the cue to dig deeper about Botswana. Botswana is Africa’s largest producer of diamonds, and second in the world after Russia. It has the fourth highest gross national income (GNI) per capita in purchasing power in Africa. However, diamonds per se aren’t what made Botswana rich. Many countries in Africa have far greater mineral wealth than Botswana, but they are dirt poor.
Botswana’s wealth is explained by it is good governance, and smart policy on minerals. In all types of rankings, it has always been among the three least corrupt countries in Africa for decades.
That has combined with its land mass, population, to create a range of striking outcomes.
Botswana covers an area of 581,730 square kilometres. However, at 2.6 million, it has one of the smallest populations in Africa. With 4.5 inhabitants per square kilometre, it is the 10th most sparsely populated country on earth.
Some of the stuff is impressive in scale. The Makgadikgadi Pan in northeastern Botswana is the largest salt pan the world. It’s about the same size as Belgium; bigger than five African countries; and seven times bigger than Mauritius.
A lot of space for few people has opened all sorts of possibilities. Botswana’s citizens aged above 18 years can apply to get free land. Years ago, they would get a plot in an urban area, and another one upcountry.
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Because of that, the country has a very low level of landlessness, and virtually none of the violence that comes from the contestation over land one sees in Uganda and Kenya, for example. It also works down to very low levels of crime overall.
That has in turn created something very strange. In the diamond-mining areas, it is prohibited to pick up stones. However, a mwananchi who finds a stone that turns out to be a diamond doesn’t lose out. They leave their ID on the spot with the stones they found beside it, and go away.
The mining organisations walk around looking for these IDs. If they take the stones and find a diamond, they call you to collect your ID and your cut of the value of the diamond.
I swear I didn’t make that up.
Charles Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer, and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. Twitter@cobbo3
Source: The East African
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