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1 Postcolonial Wisdom The Post–Civil Service and the Public Good I began my southern African research among Kalanga in Zimbabwe, then Southern Rhodesia, in the aftermath of a state emergency, in 1960. It was after riots, both urban and rural, the recent banning of one nationalist party, and the rise of another. There was an atmosphere of suspicion. Police intimidation reached remote areas of the countryside, including Bango Chiefdom , the home chiefdom of the nationalist leader Joshua Nkomo, where I began my fieldwork. It was a time of troubles, about to get worse before getting better and, sadly, now even worse. It was an early moment, heralding the liberation struggle, the civil war, and the time of state terror among Kalanga about which I report in Tears of the Dead (Werbner 1991) and elsewhere (Werbner 1996, 1998a, 1998b). Before I left Manchester, my teacher, Max Gluckman, gave me characteristic advice, based, so history tells us, on his own youthful mistakes, being politically outspoken, in Zululand: “Keep your eyes and your ears open, but your mouth shut.” It was hard, I learned to my cost. Admittedly I did try, more or less, to follow his advice, but I found it did not actually help me to avoid an occupational hazard of research by anthropologists in times of state emergency: I was made a prohibited immigrant in Rhodesia. It was only years later that I was allowed to return to that country, after Zimbabwe gained its independence. 13 Here I want to introduce an alternative perspective on postcolonial citizenship by drawing the contrast to my most recent experience of a state emergency , this time in Botswana. Scare headlines in Botswana’s newspapers for September 1999 flash the state emergency in bold type, “Mogae Blunders”; “The Buck Stops Here,” and beneath the headlines is a photo of President Festus Mogae holding his head in his hands, in anguish (Botswana Guardian, 10 September 1999; Mmegi, 10–16 September 1999). It is all about a ballot blunder, not a matter of a deliberate election fraud, as in Zimbabwe in 2002, but a simple mistake. The fault was a mere bureaucratic technicality, but if not redressed, it would have undone a major registration campaign, lost sixty thousand voters from the roll, and possibly opened legal challenges to the legitimacy of the election. The President took full responsibility. He accepted the blame; the buck did stop there. He used the only constitutional way out of the mess. Having had parliament prorogued, he had to declare an emergency , recalling parliament, in order to validate a completed roll, including the nearly lost voters. The outcome in Botswana was a state emergency like no other on the continent . No one was brutalized by thugs or by the police. There were no interruptions of public peace, no suspensions of civil order, no threats against a minority, no massacres, no waving of weapons by the police or army, no tanks rolling into the capital. Most people went about their everyday lives, as if it was business as usual. To top it all, the head of state took full responsibility and apologized to the nation for a political mess. Even his muckraking critics in the newspapers, somewhat grudgingly, had a good editorial to praise him for that. The contrast to the turbulent, brutalizing state of emergency , fresh and all too familiar in Zimbabwe and elsewhere in the region, is so stark that it speaks for itself. In Zimbabwe, sadly, as in too many other parts of Africa, the state emergency , often under draconian laws from colonial or settler regimes, forces ahead deep alienation from the state. As in the most recent abuse of the electoral process, the thuggery ensuring Robert Mugabe’s fraudulent reelection to the presidency in 2002, many citizens come away with the postcolonial wisdom that what they want from the state it cannot deliver, and what it does deliver they fear, suspect, or try to get around by any means, be it devious or subversive. They identify the state with the chefs, with the ruling few, with others not themselves. That is not the case in Botswana.1 Past the test of the country’s first state emergency, popular identification with the state remains strong, full of demands and hopes for greater fulfillment in public welfare, social justice, and, in a word that has actually not gone sour in Botswana, “development” (on the perception of the Botswana state as “a civic state, enabling personal development and initiative”; see Durham...

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