The best of times, the worst of times - Page 2
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 17: Staying Alive
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Peter Browne
UNDERLYING RADITLHOWKA'S COMMENTS, and those of other people to whom I spoke, was a sense that some of the tolerance and optimism associated with Botswana after independence from Britain in 1965 has been lost in recent years. Boarding the flight from Johannesburg to Gaborone a few days earlier, I had bumped into Neil Parsons, a historian from the University of Botswana. After we landed in Gaborone, we shared a taxi to the city. As we headed for the university, Parsons summarised his argument that the turning point for Botswana came in the early 1990s, when two things were happening simultaneously. Like many other countries, Botswana was moving away from overt government planning and control, which meant that its economy was increasingly exposed to international conditions. Meanwhile, conditions in neighbouring that country and Namibia were changing dramatically. Namibia had finally won independence from South Africa as that country was heading towards majority rule. Both countries began attracting international aid and expertise away from their relatively prosperous neighbour. "Circumstances meant that Botswana had promoted itself out of the ranks of the poorest countries," said Parsons. It lost the expertise that came with aid programs, especially from the Scandinavian countries, and it lost its special status as an island of democracy in Southern Africa.
As we left the airport, he pointed to a big, half-finished building on the right. This was a new diamond-sorting facility, the country's first, the physical manifestation of a new agreement between the multinational diamond company de Beers and the government of Botswana, and a sign, according to the Financial Times survey, of a shrewd move by the government to reduce its reliance on mining and tap into the benefits of processing diamonds.
I mentioned Parsons's analysis to Jeff Ramsey in his office on the second floor of the recently renovated presidential offices. Ramsey agreed that the fall of apartheid in South Africa was a turning point for Botswana. "It was certainly a good thing," he said, laughing, "but it means we're no longer very sexy in the wider world. In that respect we're no different from other countries in Africa." The transition to majority rule in South Africa had an enormous benefit: it allowed relations to normalise between the two countries. "Before Mandela was released, I was getting pretty worried about the way things were heading," said Ramsey. As one of the "frontline states" during apartheid, Botswana had been used as a base for anti-apartheid activity (often to the discomfort of the government in Gaborone), leading to cross-border strikes by South African forces in the mid-1980s.
Ramsey played down the threat of a more authoritarian presidency. He said that Botswana's strong traditions – "not democratic, per se, but tolerant" – and its record of transparency – "not that we're perfect, but we rate very well according to Transparency International" – would protect citizens from government. When I asked about the security legislation, he said these traditions could be relied on to ensure that the new laws weren't abused. "It's a small community," he added, "so everyone already knows what everyone else is doing."
OR DO THEY? AFTER I TALKED TO JEFF RAMSEY I hired a car and set out for Lobatse, a large, sprawling town sixty kilometres south of Gaborone, where I was due to talk to Unity Dow, Botswana's best-known living novelist. One of the themes that runs through Dow's four novels is that the informal controls that existed in Botswanan villages, where relatives and neighbours watched over and to some extent protected girls and young women from certain forms of exploitation, had broken down. Multi-partner relationships, often coercive, were one of the results, with obvious implications for efforts to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS.
In the mid-1990s, Unity Dow appeared before the High Court – which is based in Lobatse – to challenge the constitutionality of the 1984 Citizenship Act, which granted automatic citizenship to children whose father was Botswanan, regardless of the mother's nationality, but not to the children of women who were married to foreigners. At the time, Dow – who worked as a lawyer with activist organisations – was married to an American, so her children were not citizens by right. The government opposed the case, but the judgment went in Dow's favour, significantly improving the legal status of women but not necessarily endearing Dow to the government.
Yet, just a few years later, Dow was appointed the first woman judge of the High Court of Botswana. In the large, sparsely furnished lounge room of her home behind the High Court building, I asked Dow whether she was surprised when, in her late thirties and having defeated the government in a case watched around the world, she was invited to become a justice of the court.
"Yes, I was surprised, because of my age, my work, my gender ..." she said. "So why was I appointed?" She smiled, "Because of my work, my gender ..."
The court's decision in the citizenship case had an enormous impact in Botswana, helping to create a movement to change a whole range of Botswanan legislation – relating to marriage and property rights, for example – that discriminates against women.
Since she was appointed to the High Court, Dow has written four novels, the first three of which were published by Melbourne-based Spinifex Press. Her first novel, Far and Beyon' (2001), deals with the devastating impact of HIV/AIDS on a family in the 1990s. The novel captures the mood that Festus Mogae was trying to convey when he told the UN General Assembly that people were dying "in chillingly large numbers" in Botswana. Although the main characters, Mosa and her brother Stan, are bright and ambitious, Far and Beyon' conveys a strong impression of a society that has lost a great deal, without yet gaining very much, in the process of modernisation. In a matter of two or three generations, households have moved from a pastoral lifestyle to a relatively urbanised existence, accompanied by shifts in relations within families and between the sexes.
The Screaming of the Innocent (2002), Dow's second novel, is based on a real case of a ritual killing of a child, a practice that has its roots in traditional initiation ceremonies. It is a compelling account not just of how a belief in the supernatural still exists in a society that has adopted many Western beliefs and practices, but also of how powerful figures in a small town – the village head, a school principal and a successful businessmen – can force their will on ordinary people and manipulate the local representatives of government. The novel vividly portrays multi-partner relationships, which have their roots in traditional attitudes to male-female relations and sexuality. The supernatural world again plays an ambiguous role, at worst allowing individuals to escape responsibility for their own actions. "Someone else is doing things to you," said Dow. "You might drink too much, have a car crash, and then blame witchcraft. This really becomes a problem when it's applied to AIDS."
Dow's third novel, Juggling Truths (2003), returns to the kind of village that featured in Far and Beyon', but is set thirty years earlier, when the traditional codes of behaviour were stronger. This is the most successful of the four novels, written with a freshness and subtlety that matches the optimism and courage of the main character. Dow's latest novel, The Heavens May Fall (Double Storey, 2006), also portrays a more nuanced reality than the early novels, featuring a main character who shares the resolve of all Dow's heroines but finds that people's motivations are more complex than she imagined.
Again and again, especially in the novels set in the present and the recent past, men in positions of authority – teachers, police, village leaders – force themselves on young women and girls. Dow believes that this reflects changes in housing and lifestyles. "There are now a lot of private spaces that didn't exist before," she told me. "When I was growing up, houses were for sleeping in, and most of life was spent outside. It was hard for men to find the right place to commit these acts. When I was growing up there were also lots of eyes watching out. If I got home late from school and my mother wasn't home, a neighbour would ask where I'd been since school finished – and I wouldn't be surprised to be asked." Now, she says, children still obey adults outside their family, but the controls on adult behaviour have broken down.
Does this mean the problem is getting worse? "I want to be an optimist and say no," Dow said. "Working in this job you get a sense that women and children won't stand for things as much – that they won't just do what an adult says they should do. If an adult invites a child into their bedroom they know something is wrong, but they're torn between the old idea that ‘every adult is your mother or father' and their awareness of danger. Certainly the average child in Gaborone would realise that something wasn't right."
WITH A LIVELY LOCAL MEDIA, LONG-TERM POLITICAL STABILITY, a growing number of graduates and a diversifying economy, Botswana is almost unique among African countries. Yet Gaborone still has an air of improvisation – typified by the prefabricated clinic behind the Princess Marina Hospital – as if there's a feeling that the wealth might run out and leave nothing behind. Unemployment is high and Botswana continues to do badly in international comparisons of income inequality. But many African countries would no doubt be happy to have Botswana's problems as long as they also had the country's wealth and its tradition of political stability.
The stability has at least one price. It's summed up in a comment about the government's program of free anti-retroviral treatment, made by Alice Mogwe, director of the Botswanan human rights organisation Ditshwanelo. "The government gives but does not empower," she says. "Its progress is based on dependency." The risk is that the government will push this paternalism in a more authoritarian direction, which could undermine the open discussion and local activism that is essential in fighting HIV/AIDS. ♦