Botswana's luck
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Gaborone In 1947 the Royal Family paid a state visit to South Africa. The King and Queen and the two young princesses crossed the Union in high style, travelling in the special White Train. More than most royal tours, their visit had a political purpose. General Smuts was still Prime Minister but near the end of his career and indeed of his life, try- ing to ward off the challenge of the Na- tionalists. A visit by the King, head of the Empire, might consolidate English- speaking and some moderate Afrikaner support.
It did not work. Next year the Nats won power in South Africa and they have held it ever since. A little more than a dozen years later the Union had become a republic and had left the Commonwealth. Nowadays no member of the Royal Family could visit South Africa, although the other year, on her way to Swaziland, Princess Anne had to change aircraft at (the ironically named) Smuts Airport in Johannesburg, to the gawps of the South African press.
The Prince of Wales has been gawped at also, and at greater length, as he tours four southern African countries. His vist has been supposedly non-political. In reality nothing that happens in Africa south of the Zambesi is free from political overtones. Even the Commonwealth Development Corporation, under whose aegis and as a member of whose board he is here, has a far from uncontroversial record. Not long ago it was accused of dubious investment in the Philippines (not in any case usually counted part of the Commonwealth: some mistake surely?) and one doesn't have to be Pro- fessor Lord Bauer to know that 'development' and 'aid' are themselves loaded concepts.
Of the countries which the Prince has visited, Botswana is the one which is least obviously in need of passing the 'aid' beg- ging bowl. What it needs most of all at the moment is rain, as does the whole of southern Africa. The Prince's first CDC duty the morning after his arrival was to open a crushing plant alongside the Gaborone dam, which is being expanded to hold more water for the town if ever there is more water to hold. Most of the press corps had melted away in the morning heat, com- plaining of the boredom of the tour, of hav- ing to watch yet another tribal dance, of the rumour that there would be no drinks serv- ed at the High Commission reception that evening.
In addition to the hard-core press corps there is, by the way, an additional cohort of reporters and photographers — this is one of the things about journalism that is not shameful but only dejecting — following the heir to the throne in case anything should happen to the Queen in Jordan ('Apart from that, Sir, how did you enjoy Molopo?'). The hacks sloped off to their bars and for an impromptu cricket match but there was no rest for the Prince as he turned the switch and made conversation with the toilers yet again. One felt terribly sorry for the Royal Family: a lifetime spent asking, 'And do tell me, what sort of rocks are you crushing today?' and having to ask moreover with an appearance of being in- terested in the answer.
After the crushing plant, the abattoir: no, not a tour of uninterrupted glamour. But abattoirs are very important to Botswana. It raises far more beef that it can consume and as well as selling meat to South Africa has a favourable trading agreement with the Common Market under the Lome Convention by which it exports large quantities of beef to the EEC at Euro- pean prices. By a happy coincidence, several of the large livestock owners are members of the Government. (Just like the Africans and quite unlike a country where the Secretary of State for Energy and the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland can make fortunes as `agribusinessrnen' while holding office.) That is one of Botswana's economic strengths. More important are diamonds. A South African newspaper put in for the Pilger Prize last Sunday by speaking of Botswana's 'serious balance of payments problem'. In fact it is awash with hard cur- rency since it is now one of the four largest diamond-exporting countries in the world. Approximately the tallest building in Gaborone is the headquarters and sorting office of the Botswana Diamond Corpora- tion. The building looks as though it was designed by the same architect as the De Beers building in Kimberley. De Beers own 49 per cent of the BDC, but in any case the companies are inseparably related through the central selling organisation, the sales cartel which De Beers themselves ultimately control.
All of which complicates Botswana's relations with her mighty neighbour. This country has been closely bound up with South Africa for more than a century, in- deed from before the days when 'South Africa' meant a particular state. It was a strip of Bechuanaland that Chamberlain ceded to Rhodes's British South African Company and from which Jameson launch- ed, a few score miles from here, his calamitous raid. Along with the other 'High Commission Territories' it was formerly under the direct rule of the British High Commissioner who was also ambassador, in effect, to South Africa. The South
The Spectator 31 March 1984 Africans made repeated attempts on Bechuanaland (now Botswana), Basutoland (now Lesotho), and Swaziland (unchanged), hoping to incorporate them in a greater South Africa. The British resisted and even- tually granted independence to all three. The consequence has been interesting, paradoxical and instructive. Botswana is a happy country as countries go. Its vast ter- ritory, mostly desert, and its tiny popula- tion of scarce a million, are well ruled, again as these things go. The administrative elite is small, which is no bad thing in itself, and more or less uncorrupt. The new political upper class seems to have come to terms with the traditional aristocracy, a compromise which was formerly embodied in the person of the late Sir Seretse Khania, under whose benevolent rule Botswan3 became independent.
Internally the country is a multi-Par,tY democracy which has avoided the disastrous 'socialist' experiments of rnanY African countries. Externally it practises a radical foreign policy. That is, it is 00 stooge of South Africa, joins in the anathemata at the United Nations, would have nothing to do with the 'accord' just reached between South Africa and Moza bique. At the same time, Botswana 's careful to avoid giving real offence to her neighbour. The African National Congress is not welcome here and there is con- siderable intercourse across the border. This week the town has been stiff with. South Africans, trippers as well as iottr' nalists (Gaborone is little more than four hours' drive from Johannesburg), and it is easy enough to hear Afrikaans being spoken at bars. This may speak of humbug, or sirnPlY commonsense. South Africa collo 'destabilise' or simply conquer Botswana if she chose to, but has no reason to, esPec1,a1- ly given the part played here by the Angin' American De Beers complex, one of the great powers of the continent. EquallY, Botswana is well content with its Present condition. It sells meat to and diamonds to, or rather through, South Africa, and is dependent on silent goodwill for the suPPIY of maize, with the drought more now than ever. It refuses to be part of the 'incorpora- tion' of neighbouring states which is South Africa's external policy, and yet it is alreadY and ineluctably incorporated in a larger South African economy which it is in n° one's interest to disrupt. South Africa is condemned within and, without for its institution of 'independent black homelands. And yet there Was already a model for the homelands in the recognised and rightly admired neighbour; ing countries such as Botswana. Some °1 those countries, members of the OAU, are trheaalnlysommoe of more dependent'homelands' eloannde b South Afrieia the next-door Bantustan f B wana, fellow countrymen of Botswana, which has considerable mineral resources' History and nature have both been kind t7 until the visit. to last at leas —o p hnti°t thaat sY-
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