Reasonable Radicals and Citizenship in Botswana: The Public Anthropology of Kalanga Elites

4. Cosmopolitan Ethnicity, Entrepreneurship, and the Nation

4 Cosmopolitan Ethnicity, Entrepreneurship, and the Nation cosmopolitan ethnicity In Botswana, as in much of Africa, cosmopolitan ethnicity has a characteristic tension. Cosmopolitan ethnicity is urban yet rural, at once inwardand outward-looking; it builds interethnic alliances from intra-ethnic ones; and it constructs difference while transcending it. Being a cosmopolitan does not mean turning one’s back on the countryside, abandoning rural allies, or rejecting ethnic bonds.1 Although that may sound paradoxical, put abstractly , it keeps in focus a dynamic of transcendence interacting with difference and it also allows for interethnic partnerships. Understanding the postcolonial force of cosmopolitan ethnicity calls for theoretical interest not merely in ethnic differentiation or opposition or in conflict and competition but also in interethnic cooperation and mutuality. Hence I discuss the postcolonial development of cosmopolitans’ interethnic partnerships, and the importance of trust within an ethnic group for the powerful extension of trust beyond it. The broader process within which such cosmopolitan ethnicity arises in Botswana is minoritization. By minoritization, I mean the national process of making minorities who, in terms of consciousness, identification, and labeling , are actively differentiated from a majority and from one another and 63 yet, in some ways, also transcend their differences. In chapters 2 and 3 I discussed minoritization as one national process somewhat in tension with others , including regionalization, reintegration, and indigenization, but here I focus my argument more narrowly. My immediate interest is in documenting elite cosmopolitanism in the context of minority and majority relations, and I show how these are expressed in terms of belonging as super-tribalism, opposing “us” and “them” and yet mirroring “them” in “us.” I argue that these relations are permeable and are as much moral as they are political; hence I question the approach to ethnicity that cuts away their interrelation, as in the distinction between “moral ethnicity” and “political tribalism” (Lonsdale 1994; Berman 1998; and see below). On that basis I contextualize cosmopolitan ethnicity , relate it to elite entrepreneurship, and disclose the significance of both for postcolonial studies of political and moral economy in Africa and more generally. options for minority identity In the case of Kalanga there are varied options for membership or identity . One is public self-identification; another is passing as Tswana. Some Kalanga in Botswana consciously seek to be part of the majority by concealing any traces of Kalanga identity. It is also not unusual for Kalanga parents to give their children Tswana names for fear of discrimination in jobs and in the award of places in higher education. This, despite a very widespread counter-rumor, perhaps first arising close to Independence and rehearsed in Parliament by an accusing MP in the late 1970s, that under the direction of a Kalanga Director, Ministry of Education officials discriminated in favor of Kalanga by earmarking application forms with the secret Kalanga sign of a peanut. Thus by their favorite food would they be known. With a touch of ironic humor, wondering why only Kalanga could draw peanuts, the official responsible for bursaries, herself originally from Lesotho, told me that at the time she hardly knew which names were Kalanga and that her Minister was outraged by the accusation. I have been taken aback by how widely and strongly this ethnic slander is believed, even among university academics. Still other options exist for those completely assimilated in Tswana language , culture, and tribal affiliation. Some only discover from others’ labeling that they are in some sense Kalanga, through an unknown father or remote ancestry or even the classification of a tribal category or ward to which they belong. They are, as it were, “outed” by others, by Tswana or by Kalanga, who may even taunt them for hiding their identity or for foolishly falling into “the wrong camp” by not knowing where they really belong. Kalanga identity is most acutely politicized, and it readily becomes a publicized reality , when jobs, promotions, and elections are at stake, including election to the highest office in the land. Thus comes the best recent example: a tribal citizens negotiating power 64 ward’s classification was used for the public outing of the Kalanga identity of well-known Tswana speakers, such as President Festus Mogae himself2 who very recently has been subject to public disparagement as a “Shona” with origins in Zimbabwe (an apology was also made publicly), the Shona and Kalanga being lumped together as one “immigrant” category (Botswana Gazette, 24 April...