Botswana: the closed paradise (2003)

What does the world know of Botswana?  Pictures of George Bush’s summer trip to Africa were flashed across the region.  In Johannesburg, the most popular image was Bush’s visit to a Botswanan safari.  Dubya spent just forty-five minutes among the elephants of Gaberone, far less than Bill Clinton, who had the grace to stay overnight.  The South African press delighted at one obstacle met by the Presidential cavalcade.  The most powerful man in the world parked his car for five minutes and waited patiently, rather than disturb two elephants, rutting in the mid-afternoon sun.

            In September, a different image was sent out.  Reports came out of a 300-mile electric fence, which the government is erecting along the border with Zimbabwe.  The Botswanan government has denied that this eight-feet high barrier is aimed against people.  The target is livestock.  But these are strange animals, whose routes need to be guarded by immigration officers, army and police.  The desert paradise has a different side.  Poor Zimbabweans are excluded, while rich western tourists remain welcome.  Their dollars help to keep the Botswanan economy afloat. 

Spending his time with the country’s elite, George Bush missed out on the opportunity to experience the real highlight of Botswanan tourism, the Okavango delta.  Formed by rainwater running South and East from Angola, the delta consists of some sixteen thousand square kilometers of water, situated right in the middle of the Kalahari desert.  It is an extraordinarily fertile landscape of grass, papyrus and wetland trees.  A magnet for crocodiles, hippopotamus, cattle, deer and a dozen unique species of African birds, the network of islands and narrow rivers remains wet (at least in its Northern uplands) right throughout the year. 

            The history of Botswana predates colonialism.  Stone tools and axes have been found in the delta region from up to thirty thousand years ago.  The country is as large as France, but its population is less than two million.  In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Tswana people enjoyed a form of federation.  Conflicts over land or property were resolved without violence.  Those involved in disputes simply departed for unoccupied regions.  The region became a unitary state, only in response to encroachments by European settlers from the couth. 

Later, Botswana became something of a labour reserve.  By the 1940s, over half of the national income came in the form of remittances from migrant workers in South Africa or Zimbabwe.  Having traveled east to work on tobacco plantations, the children of migrant labourers are determined to keep their onet-time hosts out.  Diamonds were found in Botswana in 1967, copper is mined there today, and soda ash gathered on the salt flatlands.  The Botswanan economy enjoys large currency reserves and a stable currency.  It is easy to see why Bush was so keen to do business.  The country has never been at war, and has only had an army since the late 1970s.  Since independence, the moderate Democratic Party has ruled Botswana continuously and without serious challenge.

            Trips to the Okavango tend to begin in Maun (pronounced Ma-oon in Tswana, Maarn by whites), a town of around 50,000 people packed with bars, clubs, sports halls and tourist camps.  One friend dubs it, ‘a drinking town with a safari problem'.  The heart of the local economy is formed by a tar road, constructed only in the last ten years with the help of Asian migrant labour.  The local banks still quote exchange rates for Hong Kong dollars and Japanese Yen, although not Zimbabwean currency or travelers’ cheques, ‘as there is no demand for their resale’. 

Visiting Maun is in some ways like watching the industrial revolution in progress, as clusters of developed business interact, including a new transport company, building firms, Toyota franchises, supermarkets, a new warehouse, educational and training consultancies.  The other obvious comparison is with apartheid-era South Africa.  Afrikaans is widely spoken, and an acknowledged segregation is practiced in terms of housing and all forms of social life.

The local paper, The Ngami Times, reports the introduction of permits for construction companies, accused of pumping water from the local hippo pool.  Another story defends the publication of an article reporting the death of a tourist at the hands of fifteen lions.  The tour companies had argued that such bad news should not appear in print.  The Ngami Times supports its decision, but cautiously.  ‘This newspaper defends the tourism industry through and through and the industry knows it too’.  The headline story reports that the Paramount Chief of the Batawana (Tawana II) has decided to abdicate, in order to begin a political career.  His three year old son Tawana III has already been appointed as the King’s successor.

            One topic of discussion at night is the condition of the Okavango river.  For if the waters fail, then tourism will dry up, and the economy suffer accordingly.  The size of the town has perhaps trebled in the last ten years, while the number of visitors to the delta has risen similarly.  Before 1989, Maun itself used to have the river flowing through it all year round, and since then the waters have been receding.

            The second common talking point is the indolence of native labour.  White foremen, escaping at night-time to the bars, report on the impossibility of educating Botswanan workers into the disciplines of modern work.  'Too many people own their own land.  When they get bored of working for you, they just go home.'  The sniggers that follow are only recycled versions of old Johannesburg jokes.

At the edges of the bars, however, black faces are listening.  In Zimbabwe and South Africa, the casual racism of most whites led necessarily to collective black rebellion.  In Botswana, by contrast, the hatred has been turned from the outside in.  Alfred Dube, Botswanan representative to the United Nations was quoted justifying his country's 'apartheid wall', by arguing that all Zimbabweans were criminals or worse.  'It is very unfortunate that we have our houses being burgled every day and our children harassed ...  The Zimbabweans must go.'

            The seething takes place against a background of splendour.  A network of tourist camps crosses the Okavango.  The nearest of them can be reached by car, but the most common means of arrival is by plane.  Visitors are then boated along the river on flat mekoro dugout canoes, quiet enough not to disturb elephants or lion drinking at the waterfront.  A week at the grandest elephant camps might set you back as much as twenty thousand US dollars.  I stay with friends in Nxamasaire, a more affordable, but hardly modest camp built at tree level from pines and teak.

The only other guests are a team from the National Geographic filming crocodiles.  They depart at ten each winter evening in order to catch the reptiles at their calmest.  In the trees we spot bush babies, a tiny monkey species.  They follow the vines downwards in search of food, before scampering back up to safety.  My own sleep is disturbed by hippo chuntering in the river outside.  We fish on the river, looking for cheap bribes to offer the local eagle, Jeffrey. 

Even in the middle of winter, the temperature tops thirty centigrade in the day.  Indeed it is this which explains the unique charm of the Okavango, the realisation that in our paradise of cool, running water, we are never more than half a day’s travel from a different environment, the dry dust of the desert sands.

            For decades, the government has been trying to stop the migration of animals across the desert, hoping in this way to secure the continuation of the water supply.  Even when this policy was applied simply to nature, its results were mixed.  Herds were divided, established watering homes turned to dust.  Environmentalists have been campaigning for years to have the fences torn down.  With people, meanwhile, any such division is more deadly.  But when Europe is so adamant that all new arrivals must be excluded, who can blame Botswana for following that lead?