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

Acknowledgments

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to acknowledge the warm conviviality and intellectual stimulation I enjoyed in Botswana over the years of my fieldwork and, among many friends, I want to thank in particular Mbiganyi and Pinkie Tibone, Gobe and Daisy Matenge, Tjakabaka and Zola Matenge, Richard, Rosina, and Changu Mannathoko, Sam and Sesai Mpuchane, Phineas and Pauline Makepe, Isaac and Pelonomme Mazonde, Francis and Henrietta Nyamnjoh, Sebata and Boithomelo Gaseitsiwe, Timon and Elizabeth Mongwa, and Gaseitsiwe and Alice Moatlhodi. I am grateful to the Nuffield Foundation for a grant in support of my urban research among Kalanga in 1999, to the International Centre for Contemporary Cultural Research and the University of Manchester for support from August to November 2000, and to the Economic and Social Research Council for partial support for my project, “The Rural-Urban Continuum in Botswana,” from November 2000 to January 2002. The conference, “Challenging Minorities, Difference and Tribal Citizenship,” which I convened with Isaac Mazonde at the University of Botswana, Gaborone, in May 2002, was a revelatory moment for my views in this book, and I am grateful also to the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Journal of Southern African Studies, the University of Botswana, and the International Centre for Contemporary Cultural Research for supporting the conference. Parts of the book appeared in Werbner 1981, 2002b, 2002c, and 2002d, and are cited with permission. Earlier versions of several chapters were presented as keynote addresses to “Manchester 99: Visions and Voices,” the fiftieth anniversary conference of the Manchester Department of Social Anthropology , to “Africa 2000,” the millennial conference of the African Studies Association (Germany) in Leipzig, and to “Challenging Minorities, Difference and Tribal Citizenship in Botswana,” and as papers presented at the Charles University, Prague, the University of Chicago, the University of California , San Diego, Macquarie University, the University of Oxford, the University of Tel Aviv, Basel University, the Satterthwaite Colloquium on African Religion and Ritual, the Sixth Biennial Conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists in Krakow, the 1999 Meetings of the American Anthropological Association, and the Nordic African Institute’s conference “Violence, Poverty, and the Politics of Identity in African Arenas,” Sophienburg Castle, Denmark. The ensuing discussions helped me greatly to carry my arguments a stage further. Joel Robbins, Deborah James, Terence Ranger, Francis Nyamnjoh, Jackie Solway, Ørnulf Gulbrandsen, Onalenna Selolwane, Filip De Boeck, Deborah Durham, Emanuel Marx, Isaac Mazonde, Don Tuzin, and Peter Skalnik read earlier versions of chapters, and while I may not have managed to meet all of their very constructive criticisms , I do thank them greatly for their generous comments. I am grateful also to Onalenna Selolwane, head of the Department of Sociology, University of Botswana, and Bennetta Jules-Rosette, director of the African and African American Studies Research Program, University of California, San Diego, for inviting me to be, respectively, Professorial Fellow and Visiting Scholar at their institutions. For their careful and very helpful editing, I want to thank Dee Mortensen and Rita Bernhard of Indiana University Press. I dedicate this book to the one who has done the most to make it possible , my wife, Pnina Werbner. The reader will be aware from my references to Pnina’s work that her contributions on citizenship and multiculturalism have inspired key parts of this book. Pnina shared much of the fieldwork with me. She read and commented on drafts, and sustained my hopes about them, even in intercontinental cell phone conversations, while I was in San Diego and she in Manchester during the final stages of writing. “Just for You” is a story of a thankful offering we often read to our children—and so, Pnina, this book, too, is “Just for You.” acknowledgments x Reasonable Radicals and Citizenship in Botswana ...