The Anglo-Boer mafia scourge

| Friday May 31, 2013 00:00

 

Historians would not be surprised at the recurring sabotage theme relating to dealings of some Britons and Afrikaners with the Botswana Meat Commission.  After all, this is a replay of what has been happening for more than 100 years and may be the reason Professor Monageng Mogalakwe at the University of Botswana hints at the possibility of the country's beef industry being in the clutches of 'an Anglo-Boer mafia.' Beyond that, the evidence from history points to the fact that apartheid-style development is a mistress that the British and Afrikaners have long shared.

One of the most successful Batswana capitalists in the last quarter of the 19th century was Khama III, ruler of the Bangwato, who plied his trade from Shoshong.  In Khama's Country In Botswana, Neil Parsons says that this town was 'the crossroads between Central and Southern Africa, the Missionaries Road, the 'Suez Canal' of colonialism, the bottle-neck and 'bowling alley' of Rhode-sians, the Road to the North for capital and to the South for labour.' Present-day Gaborone is not even close to this.

Shoshong was a halfway house that serviced the Cape-to-Rhodesia wagon-transit trade and Khama did not allow anyone travelling from south to north to bypass it.  In 1878, it had nine stores, exported 75 tonnes of ivory culled from 12,000 elephants and the following year, its total export of ivory was £30,000.  The Bangwato kgosi, who was himself a commercial tobacco farmer, was so important a figure in international commerce that during his 1895 trip to London, most major chambers of commerce feted him.  In 1910 when the capital had moved to Serowe, he formed Khama and Co. which he would use to subsidise both black- and white-owned businesses in his territory. 

In an essay that forms part of The Roots Of Rural Poverty In Central And Southern Africa, Parsons states that despite Khama's generosity, the latter identified with 'white supremacy elsewhere'.  Nowhere was 'elsewhere' more pronounced than in South Africa which was the epicentre of the Southern African regional economic system. As Mogalakwe notes, six years after the British assumed political sovereignty over Batswana, they carved up and designated fertile parts of the country such as Tuli Block, Molopo Farms as well as some parts of Gaborone and Lobatse as 'crown lands' and given to white settlers.'In the north, vast tracts of land were given to a company called Tati Concessions Ltd.  To this day our government continues to use vast amounts of money to buy land in the north east for resettlement or for expansion of Francistown.  There is evidence to support the claim that the British colonial state officials did all they could to bolster the white settlers' economic activities and prevent the emergence of an indigenous national capitalist class and even the middle class,' Mogalakwe says.

With the establishment of Bechuanaland emerged new borders that restricted trade in Khama's country - present-day central district. Such constraint also occurred internally.  In 1916, the British deliberately destroyed Khama and Co. and in 1923, the colonial government introduced the Credit Sales to Natives Proclamation whose net effect was to put African traders out of business in its attempt to limit white trader credit to African customers.  To a large extent, the success of businesses (especially small ones) depends on their ability to obtain credit but in terms of this proclamation, natives could not get credit.  Some 40 years later when he appeared before the Select Committee on Racial Discrimination, the secretary of the Bechuanaland Protectorate Associated Chambers of commerce, R P Hodden, demonstrated how this proclamation was detrimental to the success of black-owned businesses.

'Today, more and more Africans wish to purchase improved cattle.  Some have reached the state of income whereby they could reasonably expect to buy some of the better things in life to improve their standard of living.  Under this proclamation, they are precluded from obtaining on credit, building materials to build improved houses and such items of furniture, wireless sets et cetera, for furnishing their homes.  Likewise, the African farmer is precluded from buying on credit pumping plants and machinery to improve his farming activities.  Apart from this discrimination acting against Africans, it also places commerce in an invidious position when having to refuse credit-worthy Africans,' Holden told the Committee.

In 1924, South Africa had imposed restrictions to protect its cattle ranchers from competition in the High Commission Territories of Bechuanaland Protectorate, Basutoland and Swaziland.  South African prime minister at the time, James Hertzog, rightly predicted that the restrictions 'will no doubt materially further restrict the development of these territories.'  Parsons contends that the colonial government's 'promotion of economic development openly until 1930 (and more discreetly thereafter) was confined to British South Africa Company concessions and white settler production.' He further notes that by 1930, the British policies had brought about a trade deficit of £25 611 in traders' returns in Khama's territory.

The post-1933 period saw a boom in gold pricing and after the Second World War, diminished economic opportunities led to a rapid increase in labour migration to South African mines. By 1945, the British viewed all of Bechuanaland as a labour reserve for South Africa.What the foregoing establishes is that as early as the 19th century there was an Anglo-Boer economic superstructure that even Khama could not be part of.  One would have expected someone like former president, Sir Ketumile Masire to be part of this superstructure because alongside founding president, Sir Seretse Khama, he was part of the core roster that negotiated independence from the British.  However, when Masire appeared before a parliamentary committee that is investigating BMC he made an astonishing statement: that the BMC is controlled by an all-white economic superstructure that routinely deals black people (like himself) a bad hand.  The question this naturally raises is what sort of independence did we get from the British that, after leaving office, a former president is so powerless to a point that he can feel treated like a 'kaffir' by a white BMC manager?

Mogalakwe says that as a founding, Masire deserves to be treated with respect.  'I think I am right to say that people from across the political and ideological divide will agree that this country made tremendous strides in socio-economic development under the stewardship of President Masire, first as the Vice President and Minister of Finance and Development Planning and then as president of the republic.  It is totally unacceptable that he should have been treated like a beggar by BMC management.  This is an affront to the whole nation and it should pierce our national conscience.  If President Masire, with his record as one of Botswana's master farmers, could be treated like that by BMC managers, what more about the rest of us, the lesser mortals?' he says.

To Sam Ditshego, a senior research fellow at the Pan Africanist Research Institute in South Africa, this incident shows that that Botswana's independence is nominal, that it is of the 'flag independence' kind which consists of a parliament, national anthem and flag and that white people still call the shots.'At independence, Batswana were probably told that 'we the British will keep the jewels and you Batswana will keep the crown.' The same applies to South Africa and many other African countries. There has never been citizen empowerment in Botswana; rather, there was empowerment of certain individuals, the elite, along the lines of South Africa's so-called Black Economic Empowerment,' Ditshego says.

The irony of Masire being a victim is that he negotiated the sort of independence Botswana got, the sort of independence that should have altered the 1966 status quo and given Batswana full economic independence.Ditshego's explanation of this puzzle is that political elites who challenged colonialism successfully were those whom colonialists saw as the best guardians of capitalist interests.

'They were therefore cultivated and nurtured to play the unacceptable role of defenders or custodians of foreign interests.  By doing so, the colonial powers actually aborted (paradoxically with the connivance of the new elites) the African revolution that had begun after the Second World War.  Secondly, Africans assumed control over institutions that had never been designed to serve majority interests.  Indeed, the rules and procedures in the independence constitutions had been defined by the very interests relinquishing formal political control.  Thus were the ascending African elites expected to repeat the processes they had seen in operation during their period of apprenticeship at the terminal stages of colonial rule,' he says, adding that the British drove a wedge between nationalist politicians like Motsamai Mpho and Phillip Matante to give Khama an electoral advantage.

With regard to the British preserving the status quo, it is interesting to note that in the Botswana case, it was agreed at the independence talks that already-existing land rights would be preserved. In practical terms, this meant that the land rights of whites in the eastern part of the country (the most agriculturally productive) would not be interfered with despite the patently unfair manner they came to acquire such rights.

Botswana's independence was subsequently handed on a silver platter which might lead to speculation of whether that could somehow have undermined attainment of economic independence.  Would the situation have been any different if Batswana had fought for their independence?  No, says Ditshego.'Mozambique and Angola are, to a lesser degree, not any different from Botswana in terms of citizen empowerment although I understand in Angola and Zimbabwe ordinary people are allowed to mine diamonds and in Angola they do sell petrol in the street markets,' he adds.

In his dealings with Clive Marshall, the former BMC manager, Masire formed the opinion that the former was as racist as Hendrik Verwoerd, South Africa's prime minister from 1958 until 1966 when he was assassinated.  History remembers Verwoerd as the man who conceived and implemented apartheid.  Besides the underhanded dealings of BMC, Masire was placing on record racism as an issue.  However, at an official level at least, there has always been great reluctance (even during Masire's time) to get to a broader discussion about racism in present-day Botswana and during the colonial era.

Mogalakwe says that Botswana 'has not fully confronted the problems of racism' that it faces because it is 'pretending that it doesn't exist'.  He also laments a proclivity by Uncle Toms to acculturate into a western identity and perform whiteness in their every waking hour in futile effort to prove that they are sophisticated.  For his part, Ditshego says while in South Africa, racism was legislated, in Botswana it has always been subtle and that the racist legacy of Bechuanaland has never been adequately and honestly addressed.

The result has been that what happened in 1963 still happens in 2013.  Take the case of Gaositwe Chiepe who would become a cabinet minister in the post-independence government and a white man that archival records only refer to as Mr. Dixon.  As a senior education officer with a BSc, MA and UED, Chiepe earned R3,660 a year while with his MA and a senior Teachers Certificate, Nixon earned R3,990 as an education officer. 

The government's justification of this anomaly was that the latter had lengthy previous experience outside the Protectorate 'and in addition to that was given credit for war service.'Likewise a certain Motlhagodi, a headmaster at a secondary school in Molepolole who held a BA, was passed up for promotion in favour of a Mrs Kotze whom the staff notice said 'has good qualifications in home crafts'.  He later discovered that she held a teacher's diploma.The committee investigating BMC has heard that although Marshall does not hold a degree, he earned more than the CEO who has a PhD.On really bad days, the British enterprise in Bechuanaland was a cocktail of protection racketeering, kidnapping and state-sponsored robbery.  However, the general approach by the Botswana government is to sweep these under the carpet.

The words engraved in a plaque on one of the columns at the Three Dikgosi Monument in Gaborone read: 'Batswana fought alongside Allied forces for freedom and against racism.'  The fact of the matter is that the Britain of the Second World War, as today's, was mired in racism.  Winston Churchill, the country's wartime leader and therefore commander-in-chief of Batswana fighters, was an unreconstructed racist who was virulently opposed to the freedom and dignity of black people.

This is what he said in 1937: 'I do not admit that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia.  I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly-wise race, has come in and taken their place.'Former American heavyweight boxer, Muhammad Ali, refused to fight in Vietnam because he said that he had no problem with the Vietnamese.  He famously stated: 'I ain't got no quarrel with the Vietcong.  No Vietcong ever called me nigger.' Similarly, Batswana men who fought in the Second World War had no quarrel with Adolf Hitler who never called anyone of them 'boy' as the British blithely did.  These men also had no ideological commitment to the war and their attitude would have been similar to that of a Mosotho contemporary who, in later years, justified his refusal to go to war by saying that he 'really had no quarrel with Hitler or the Germans'.  Deborah Ann Schmitt, a British author who interviewed Batswana veterans for her book, Bechuanaland Pioneers And Gunners, found that the veterans 'have difficulty expressing what it all meant in the long run'.

The truth about Batswana's participation in the war was that after Singapore fell, there was need for more muscle on the battlefront and Britain's solution to this problem was to ransack its colonies for military labour.  Batswana men were conscripted but some didn't want to go.  Dikgosi despatched scouts who hunted down these draft dodgers, digging them out of traditional grain silos and pulling them out from under piles of blankets and stacks of firewood where they had hidden. They were then shipped off to Europe and the Middle East to fight.  These men left behind a country where blacks and whites were not treated equally, to fight not against the racism they were experiencing at home but that experienced by somebody else.  They passed through a racist country where fellow blacks were held in bondage and sailed thousands of nautical miles to experience racism from the British army itself.  Upon arrival in Europe the 10,000 Batswana men were organised into the African Auxiliary Pioneer Corps which was a subgroup of the Royal Pioneer Corps.  Schmitt writes that the Batswana fighters were largely trained as labourers and anti-aircraft gunners.  The AAPC's wages in the British army were the lowest. Fearing that his subjects might be subjected to racism, Kgosi Kgari Sechele of Bakwena sought and won separation of his recruits from South African fighters.  The kings of Lesotho and Swaziland did likewise.

There is also no way in the world that British society would have been racist and the Protectorate not.'Hotels had occasional cinema shows, though hotels in railway towns were racially segregated and indoor shows would have been for whites-only,' Parsons writes in an essay on the cinema experiment in Bechuanaland Protectorate From 1944 To 1946.When opened for business in the colonial era, Cumberland Hotel in Lobatse was the first 'multi-racial' hospitality establishment in the entire Protectorate.  In his biography, The Story Of A Hidden Treasure, Gobe Matenge recalls an unpleasant experience he had when he worked in Francistown as a messenger/interpreter in the colonial government.  In an almost literal sense, the future permanent secretary in an independent Botswana, found himself in a cleft stick when he showed up at the house of Dr Austin Morgan, a white medical doctor working in the district, to deliver a telegramme.  Mrs Morgan, the only person home, would not take the telegramme straight from the hands of a black man.  Instead, she ordered him to get a stick, cleave one end into two, wedge the telegramme in the cleft, then holding the other end, reach over to her with the stick to deliver the telegramme 'in such a way that she could receive it without our hands touching!'.  It is safe to assume that an uncle of Matenge's 'fought for freedom and against racism' in World War Two.

Three years after the war ended, the Batswana war veterans - with all the international experience of fighting racism they had acquired in Europe, could not stand up against South Africa when it opposed Seretse Khama's marriage to Ruth Williams on racist grounds.  Needless to say, Britain caved in.In 1884 when Bechuanaland came into being, Batswana did not even know what a 'protectorate' was and had never asked to be protected in the first place.  Odder still, there was no comprehensive defence plan to protect the protectorate which effectively meant that border communities were actually little more than human shields, themselves protecting the trade route to the north which was the one reason the protectorate came about.

The tax regime of the British also became so extortionate that one missionary lamented that the colonial government had 'a propensity to heighten taxes in proportion to the deepening distress of the general public'.In Botswana talk of the apartheid form of racism is always in reference to South Africa.  Masire's invocation of Verwoerd is confirmation of that but the fact of the matter is that the British implemented apartheid-style land allocation 68 years before Verwoerd created Bantustans in South Africa.  What are the chances he had only to look across the border to study a model that he implemented in his own country?  While the geographical entities that the latter created were later deconstructed, it is remarkable that over 95 percent of the whites-only Verwoerdian entities that Britain created in 1890 Bechuanaland (like Tati, Tuli Block and Molopo Farms) are still intact.Mogalakwe states that the net effect of the colonial government was to effectively restrict economic activity by indigenous Batswana to subsistence agriculture and reserve modern ones for Europeans and Asians.

'In the late 1950s, the Gantsi Block was given to white Afrikaners from South Africa.  My literature search has revealed that of about 440 shops registered in Botswana in 1968, only about 30 percent were owned by indigenous Batswana.  This explains why in this country, white people and people of Asian origin are well-off compared to the rest of us, the natives.  After independence, nothing was done to redress these historical injustices. Dr [Motshudi] Raborokgwe's testimony points to a possible existence of an Anglo-Boer mafia in the agricultural sector.  I am not surprised - they have long realised that we are fast asleep,' he says. Raborokgwe is the former chief executive officer who is said to have earned less than Marshall.