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

Epilogue: Postcolonial Wisdom, Beyond Afro-pessimism

Epilogue Postcolonial Wisdom, Beyond Afro-pessimism The challenge for a comparative and critical analysis of public anthropology in Africa, which this book addresses, has taken us well beyond the old agenda of Afro-pessimism. A review, setting in relief the main steps in my argument, helps to highlight that exploration. I began by addressing a concept of postcolonial wisdom, and then related it to the actual practice of the elites who take the lead in state and nation building. Throughout the book my focus has been on Botswana’s minority elites, who are Kalanga and whom I have come to know during rural and urban research from 1964, before Independence in 1966, to the present. One aim in the first chapter was to document the ways in which care for the public good and the national interest are motivating concerns for minority elites who come from the senior decision-making echelon of the civil service. These minority elites exemplify the complex interlocking of government and big business, because they position themselves at the top of the commercial sector through substantial investment as shareholders and, after leaving the civil service and parastatals, as company managers and directors . Yet they also exemplify a countervailing force for good governance by forming part of what I call the “post–civil service.” The post–civil service includes former civil servants who serve on various public bodies from tribunals to parastatals to Presidential Commissions of Enquiry. 188 My argument is that minority elites as post–civil servants are often an influence for more open democracy, greater public accountability, and more inclusive citizenship. This is because they bring pressures to bear from outside the bureaucracy—they are no longer officially apolitical or required to appear neutral—and yet, having been managerial insiders, they know, and are known to know, how to operate with the responsible ethos and ethics of decision-making civil servants. Indeed, given the opportunity as consultants and members of Presidential Commissions, minority elites as post–civil servants have been at the very forefront of the monitoring, critique, and revision of government policy and the exposure of corruption, leading on occasion even to the resignation of Cabinet Ministers. The argument is a corrective to the tendency in postcolonial studies to see the entrenched conservatism of currently serving senior bureaucrats on government committees and parastatals but to miss the post–civil servants and their impact for independent reform.1 The rejection of the state is not the beginning and the end of postcolonial wisdom, the argument shows. the shift in perspective and minority elites The second aim of chapter 1 was more personal and reflexive. It is no less important for my intended revision of the Africanist agenda, however. Like so many other Africanists, I myself have contributed to the crisis anthropology of Africa; I did so through my research in Zimbabwe on political violence , memory, and the reach of the postcolonial state (Werbner 1991, 1996, 1999b, 1998b). But when it came to Botswana, I found that I had to shift my perspective to be faithful to my long-term research experience in the country. Studying the public sphere in Zimbabwe meant attending to tyranny (Werbner 1991) and to an excess of ritual and state theatrics in the postcolony (Werbner 1998a, 1998b; see also Mbembe 2001). That excess, I showed, inflated a vastly expensive cult of the heroic dead, which aimed to glorify the regime in elaborate state memorialism. The commemoration of the birth of the nation at the barrel of an anticolonial gun has been performed at a hierarchy of independence war shrines from the national to the local (Werbner 1998b). The spectacles and theatrics in Zimbabwe have become more elaborate, even frenzied, the more the legitimacy of the state and its own origin myth has become openly questioned, indeed fiercely contested in the face of brutal repression. In Botswana, by contrast, state theatrics are minimal: even the opening of Parliament is simple, though, as some citizens say, perhaps it is a bit too much on the Westminster model. It takes place in a Spartan building largely bereft of regalia or political symbolism; and every president, proud of a tradition of accessibility, normally moves about modestly and fearlessly, without a vast entourage, as a man of the people. There could hardly be a more striking image for this contrast than epilogue 189 each country’s president on the road: Zimbabwe’s president, Robert...