DE LAS AUSENCIAS DE LOS MIEMBROS DEL COMITÉ EJECUTIVO NACIONAL

Academic studies of the interaction between agro-pastoral and foraging populations in Botswana are basically dominated by two traditions. First, there is the isolationist/evolutionist model which contends that Kgalagari-San people historically existed in a world of pristine isolation from the rest of the Tswana communities (Motzafi-Haller, 1994). This perspective gained popularity in the 1950s largely due to the work carried out by the Harvard Kalahari Project and their associates. Some of these scholars like Richard Lee and Irene Devore actually believed that "early man" still existed in the Kalahari in the 1960s. The San were depicted as "unusually isolated and traditionally oriented" (Good, 1993, p. 211). One of the members of this school of thought argued that the "San traditional way of life" was "strongly" opposed to the "accumulation of property and wealth" (Guenther, 1976, p. 131 and 1986).

The Harvard Kalahari team found "not poverty and loss", among the San in the 1960s, "but a continuing communality, peace and justice": a "truly communal" and a remarkable "sharing way of life" was thought to be in actual practice unchanging and unchanged over long periods of time (Good, 1993). This theoretical assumption of an egalitarian community living in a "state of nature" and at peace with itself fitted well with the evolutionary and ecological models of the 1950s and 1960s. However, studies later indicated that this conception, wittingly or otherwise, helped to legitimise Kalahari-San propertylessness by romantically emphasising their aboriginality.

By the 1970s this theoretical perspective came under particularly intense scrutiny and criticism from social science that recognised the historical vacuity in the isolationist models. New theoretical models emerged from a swelling body of archaeological, historical and ethnographic work that challenged the assumptions of orthodox anthropology. These studies focused on the examination of contact situations among the Kalahari-San, Tswana-speaking ethnic groups and Europeans (Hitchcock, 1982). What emerged was a historical-interactive model which

demonstrates how connections between forces of capitalist penetration led to the emergence of historically specific socio-cultural formations in modern Botswana.

Based on models of political economy developed in the 1980s, the historical-interactive perspective sought to illustrate how the ahistorical nature of the isolationist-evolutionist models played into the hands of Tswana elite who found an ideological justification in the myth of San aboriginality. The thrust of this argument is nowhere more emphasised than in the assertion that it provided:

... the basis for an effective tradition which might disguise the dispossession and dehumanisation wrought upon the San by Tswana elites... Coupied with policies stressing intensified commercial cattle production, the manufactured tradition could become part of a fairly cohesive development whole, which ignored the past and minimised the present in favour of moving forward. The Basarwa (sic) could be kept in their place, and the tradition might gain in support, legitimacy, and strength (Good, 1993, p. 211).

(a) Historical Background

The association of Kalahari-San people with the "bush" is rooted in history and not, as the Tswana-speaking groups suggest, in their nature (Solway, 1994b). The myth of a pristine, leaderless, propertyless and lawless San living in "continuing communality" actually obscures long-standing historical differentiation processes.

Wilmsen (1990) demonstrate how the Khoisan people developed and controlled the means of production and trade over large parts of the Kalahari centuries before their contact with Tswana-speaking people. At the beginning of the present millennium, these people were shown not only to have been engaged in long distance trade but they also had been long engaged in the production of ceramics. Archaeological excavation has identified a number of agro-pastoral sites in the Kalahari dating from AD 700.

European travellers like Burchell (1822) and Livingstone (1857) provided eye-witness accounts of San cattle-keeping. Wilmsen (1989a) even provides a convincing argument that Khoisan speaking people were the first pastoralists in Botswana. It has been established that these people were hierarchically ranked and that they had their own independent, and often powerful, chiefs.

The analysis above begs the critical question; how did the Kalahari San come to be a dispossessed community dependent on the magnanimity of their Tswana-speaking and European counterparts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? This question is not easy to

been established that a rising Tswana elite gained in wealth and power at a time when the Kalahari San suffered increasing deprivation of property and political autonomy (Good 1993, Solway, 1994b, Motzafi-Haller, 1994). It is therefore possible that San deprivation can be attributed to Tswana accumulation: a theme to which we shall return later in this chapter.

(b) Tswana Elite Domination and the San

Diana Wylie (1990) argues that structural inequality was the core concept in the Tswana political realm of the previous century symbolised, she says, by the proverbial expression that "no man was another's equal" (batho ga re lekane re se meno). The interdependence between political power and economic wealth was illustrated by the prevalent usage of the term "Kgosi" for both a chief and a rich man. Thus acceptance and legitimisation of social divisions had firm ideological formations. She argues that;

... soon after Tswana cattlemen had appropriated springs in the Kalahari, the Sarwa who had formerly used those scarce water points found their labour, first as hunters appropriated by the cattlemen as well (Wylie, 1990, p. 84).

San dispossession took different forms. Earlier studies contended that San engagement in long-distance trade was disrupted by the advent of intrusive Portuguese traders around the Indian Ocean and Angola. This approach, however, should be rejected on the theoretical basis that, besides granting too powerful a role to external forces in the exploitation of the Kalahari San and thus rendering them somewhat passive in the face of capitalist penetration, it also assumes that trade and exchange between various social groups necessarily entail domination. We have shown in the previous sections of this thesis that this was not the case.

In this chapter we seek to analyze political domination not only in terms of economic exploitation but also in everyday practices and dominant discourses. A careful analysis of patterns of participation in, or exclusion from, social instructions, the dominant social discourse and political economy in general, is central to our understanding of a particular dynamic of rural differentiation that obtains mostly in north western Botswana today.

(c) Colonial Antecedents to Post-Colonial Bureaucratic Domination

Historical sources indicate that contacts between the Khoisan and Bantu-speaking groups go back some 2000 years (Hitchcock and Holm, 1993). In the previous two and three centuries a series of agro-pastoral Tswana-speaking kingdoms and chieftains emerged in the present day Botswana (Tlou, 1972,1984 and Tlou and Cambell, 1984). Tswana imperial expansion, like that of the Zulu under Shaka, was typically characterised by incessant incorporation of ethnic groups other than Tswana although conflicts among various Tswana polities were also common. Through these wars of conquest, non-Tswana peoples, like the Kalanga in the north east, the

Bayei in the north west, and Bakgalagadi in the central Kgalagadi district were turned into tributary states. Subject groups enjoyed limited civil and political rights within their domain but they were constantly exposed to the brutality of Tswana sub-imperialism, especially during the colonial period.

However, the San were fully incorporated in Tswana society and, as illustrated in Chapter 2, subjected to conditions bordering on slavery. Towards the turn of the nineteenth century an emerging Tswana political elite imbued with Christian values and slightly informed about the spirit and the culture of enlightenment that swept over Europe and other parts of the world, subsequent to both the French and American revolution in the eighteenth century, began campaigning for a betterment of the lot of the Khoisan as an economic and social underclass. Chief Khama III of the Bangwato, then the largest Tswana-speaking group, is credited for having been the first enlightened Tswana despot to enforce an ordinance compelling cattle-owners to provide cattle to their Khoisan employees for their labour (Schapera, 1947 and Parson, 1980). Schapera actually records that Khama III abolished the payment of tribute by the Khoisan in 1911.

These legal reforms were not effective at all. Tshekedi Khama, who succeeded Khama III as Regent in 1923, boasted that after acquiring an estimated 50,000 cattle "he inherited all Khama's cattle and thus the area in which they were run" and most of those lands belonged to the Khoisan (Good, 1993). As a result of this massive land alienation, serf ownership flourished in the 1930s and, among the handful of royals in whom wealth was concentrated, Tshekedi Khama was the largest serf owner and some 3,000 San were his personal property (Crowther and Miers, 1988).

In the aftermath of a prolonged and bitter feud within the Ngwato chieftaincy in 1926, Simon Ratshosa, who is still regarded by some historians as the first Tswana nationalist, in a statement in evidence against Tshekedi Khama's "enlightened dictatorship" stated that;

... the Masarwa are slaves. They can be killed. It is no crime... If they run away their masters can bring them back and do what they like in the way of punishment. They are never paid. If the Masarwa live in the vetd and I want any to work for me, I go and take any I want (ibid., p. 172).

Be that as it may, the injustices perpetrated by Tswana elites against the objects of their exploitation and disdain, did not go unnoticed by the colonial administration and the international community. Ruthless Tswana domination over the Khoisan and the intensity of bureaucratic encroachment into Khoisan lives by both Batswana and European settlers resulted in allegations of Khoisan slavery by the League of Nations in the 1920s (Hermans, 1978). This foreign intervention was part of the growing concern in the international sphere about the plight of

On its part, the colonial administration's policy preoccupation with the so-called "Bushmen problem" was to provide an institutional framework capable of freeing the Khoisan from their bondage. One of the most ambitious undertakings initiated by the colonial administration to achieve this goal came about as a result of the Silberbauer Commission of 1965. After his appointment to the position of Bushmen Survey Officer in 1958, Silberbauer carried out an investigation into the plight of the Khoisan and, in line with previous such investigations like the Simon Ratshosa Report (1926), the Tagart Commission (1933) the Joyce Commission (1938) and the Schapera Report (1939), came up with a series of recommendations. Some social scientists have pointed out that these investigations, by and large, were essentially futile exercises. In a scathing attack on "problem solving by commissioner of inquiry" it has been argued that:

both the colonial and post-independence regimes have had to deal with the so-called Bushmen problem. Each Government has responded with a formal investigation which inevitably proposes remedial programmes. In spite of the rhetoric of local participation the resulting programmes are essentially the transfer of the San from their previous conditions of economic servitude to various forms of dependence on, and control by, the Government or the exchange of one form of domination for another (Hitchcock and Holm, 1993, p. 315).

Silberbauer, however sought a more practical solution. The most important recommendation by the Silberbauer Commission was the establishment of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, covering some nine percent of the country, as the home to the Khoisan. It was argued that the protection of the Khoisan, and the internally cherished fauna and flora of the Kalahari desert within this sanctuary, would attract powerful support and defence by international environmentalists and human rights groups. The reaction of the Tswana populace was, however, not considered and, as we shall see later, this omission was to prove the Achilles heel on the Silberbauer strategy. Meanwhile the plan to establish this sanctuary for the Khoisan materialised, and the latter, who by the 1950s had been reduced to a foraging mode of existence, were allowed to hunt and gather as long as they used rudimentary tools like bows and arrows.