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This paper argues that land alienation that occurred in the Tati District (North East District) of Botswana can best be returned to its original inhabitants through land restitution. This is because the Tati is unique from other districts in that other districts did not suffer from severe or intense colonial land alienation, whilst the Tati, in many ways, resembled the overcrowded and impoverished African reserves of the settler dominated territories of Zimbabwe, Kenya and South Africa, which had large prosperous farms for white farmers. It holds that a historical wrong was committed in the Tati and that this justifies land restitution. The paper concurs with the contention that the Market Based Land Reform (MBLR) programme which adopts the 'Willing Buyer–Willing Seller' (WBWS) approach adopted by the Botswana government since independence to ease the land shortage in the Tati District has not succeeded. The land restitution process in South Africa is used as a case for adoption in Tati. The paper acknowledges the complexities of the process there, and proposes that the situation in Botswana is somewhat different. It is argued that in Botswana, the economic empowerment measures that are currently in place, particularly the agricultural schemes would to a large extent overcome some of the major challenges of land restitution in the Tati. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explains Botswana's non-aligned stance at the United Nations in the 1970s. It focuses on two diplomatic wars between China and Taiwan, and between North Korea and South Korea. Botswana's position was challenged by intimidation from South Africa and Rhodesia, and threats to cut aid from the United States. Gaborone was concerned with building its legitimacy among African states who questioned Botswana's anti-colonial and anti-apartheid credentials. President Seretse Khama, when managing Cold War and southern African geopolitics, used the China and Korea questions to assert Botswana's agency and sovereignty as a non-aligned state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study of grassroots ecumenism in Botswana focuses on the funerals in which much interdenominational co-operation and religious rapprochement prevails, even against troubling dissent. Because this accomplishment is relatively exceptional not only in southern Africa but in the continent as a whole, its special history, in a post-colonial shift towards religious tolerance, is examined along with its more enduring socio-cultural basis. The account documents the emergence of a whole shared repertoire of ideas and practices, and a distinctive social space outside any church, for activating grassroots ecumenism in its boundary-crossing, its inclusive relatedness and its opening of belonging in the presence of difference. A simple logic, tied to common-sense assumptions about gender roles, is shown to inform certain parts of this shared repertoire. The analysis of cases from funerals in Tswapong villages in the Central district and in the city discloses how ecumenical and anti-ecumenical tensions are managed, especially by local ministers, while caring mourners try to console the bereaved and maintain amity for the sake of promised salvation for the dead. Given the importance, in the funerals as in public life, of civic ideals, decorum and formality, this analysis also clarifies how public officials conclude, and even regulate, funerals by bringing together their appeals, ecumenical ones to God and civic ones for the upholding of citizenship, of moral interdependence and responsibility in village life. More generally, the argument is that grassroots ecumenism is a boundary-crossing phenomenon of broad interest for comparative analysis of the cultural and social creation of a popular religious movement that looms large in everyday lives and which contributes to the welcome shape of citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the earliest class-based societies, social leveling mechanisms have limited, actively as well as unconsciously, social stratification. Understanding how such power structures have operated in the past and present requires the integration of social dimensions to the political economy in a way that does not assume that elites and/or urban centers drive the course of history. Here, the Middle and Late Iron Age in southern Africa (AD 900-1650) highlight the importance of these local dynamics in tandem with broader regional changes. At a time when protoglobal trade links Africa to the Middle East and Asia, cities emerged up to 1,000 km inland along with the material evidence for hereditary inequality. Yet the population at the trade center of Bosutswe at the eastern edge of the Kalahari responded flexibly to environmental and social variables, which, perhaps unintentionally, limited the consolidation of power in the hands of the elite. The following case study of Khubu la Dintša, a small agropastoral site near Bosutswe, reminds us that, even as hegemony exists, an emphasis on the social networks that tie together local and disparate groups results in not just daily patterns of behavior but also significant social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study on schisms in Zimbabwean anti-colonial movements in Botswana in 1959-1979. It argues that the causes of the antagonisms between these movements were similar to the Zimbabwe African Peoples Union split on August 8, 1963, leading to the birth of the Zimbabwe African National Union. It also contends that the causes of the differences between these movements emanated from competition for Botswana government recognition, leadership styles and strategies for the struggle.

In the 1930s, migrant labour became the prime determinant of emerging infectious diseases, particularly tuberculosis, in the Bechuanaland Protectorate due to the repatriation of infected workers from neighbouring South African mines. The mining boom had led to an unprecedented increase in migrant labour and this in turn resulted in a high rate of tuberculosis infection and mortality. This article examines local perceptions of tuberculosis in the eastern Bechuanaland Protectorate from 1932 to 1964, when rates of infection and mortality were reduced with the help of medical breakthroughs in antibiotic therapy. While studies of migrant labour in Southern Africa have addressed political, social, and economic aspects of disease, nothing has been written about the multiple ways in which rural communities drew from their cultural repertoire to negotiate this emerging pathology. This article mines the extant medical records housed at the Botswana National Archives and juxtaposes them with oral testimony to examine and illuminate the culturally specific arenas in which the socio-ecological beliefs, values, and meanings of tuberculosis were created and contested among communities of eastern Bechuanaland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines how the ideas of morality, marital fidelity, and sexual continence in Eastern Bangwato Reserve, Botswana were undermined by African cultural accommodations of male entitlements and sexual relations from the 1930s to the 1950s. Topics include the role of African cultural notions and practices on the spread of sexually transmitted diseases such as syphilis, the indigenous cultural constructions of human sexuality, and prostitution.

Kgosi Linchwe II of the Bakgatla-ba-Kgafela – a cross-border chieftainship in Botswana and South Africa – was at the centre of a network of trans-frontier links that played an important role in the liberation struggle in South Africa. In the context of the reluctant inaction of Botswana's national government, as a state surrounded by states under South African influence and economically dependent upon them, this case demonstrates a hitherto hidden aspect of the activities of the liberation movements in the region. The case of Linchwe II demonstrates the ways in which the authority, influence and connections that underpinned his chiefly power made it possible to assist the liberation movements in ways that the state government was unable to do because of concerns for national security. This study reveals a hidden history of involvement in the struggle that has been obscured by the historiographical focus on the international politics of Botswana, using a deep, micro-historical focus on a region that was highly involved in, connected with and affected by the South African liberation struggle. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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The paper recounts the fascinating story of some African chiefs (dikgosi) in what was then Bechuanaland Protectorate (now Botswana) who used their meagre resources in 1946 to block the incorporation of another colonial territory (Namibia) into the Union of South Africa. The paper argues that the action of the Batswana dikgosi was far from being a progressive and selfless act on their part, but a skilful strategy to block the incorporation of their own protectorate. It was in fact part of a longstanding strategy of using anything that would remove the chances of incorporation. The paper further suggests that the campaign may also have been in part the dikgosi's lawyer Douglas Buchanan, who skilfully weaved the dikgosi's fear of the incorporation of their own country into the broader regional and international politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses discourses of poor work ethic in Botswana from the colonial 1930s to the first decade of the new millennium. The traditional Batswana ethos stressed the importance of hard work, but in the early 1930s British colonial administrators had begun to complain about the Batswana chiefs, leading to colonial policy changes intended to address attitudes to work. Despite these changes, the issue of poor work ethic remained a critical topic of discussion by the colonial hierarchy in the mid-1940s, and a long-running debate has continued ever since, targeted today at the post-colonial public service. This article shows how debates about poor work ethic intensified in the post-colony owing to political patronage, corruption and politicisation of the public service by Botswana's ruling élite. This discourse describes the erosion of a traditional ethos of self-help and self-reliance and decries its replacement by a syndrome of over-dependence on the state by the people. Meanwhile, numerous attempts by government to address poor work ethic have produced unimpressive results. Although a meaningful quantitative comparison of colonial and post-colonial work productivity would be difficult to achieve, an analysis of the evolution of discourses surrounding work ethic in Botswana can yield insights into changes in attitudes of people and the state toward work and social welfare from the colonial period to the present. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Due to a combination of exceptional economic growth and social development, Botswana has been hailed as an African developmental state. This article rejects the developmental state theory and instead attempts to build an alternative theoretical model. It argues that from the 1930s until the present, Botswana has experienced a state structure characterized by natural resource dependency, lack of economic diversification, a dual society, selective social development and a close connection between the economic and political elite. In the tentative theoretical model presented and discussed here, these are all defining traits of a gate-keeping state. It is hence argued that while Botswana's socio-economic development since independence should in no way be underestimated, it is better understood as the efforts of a development-oriented gate-keeping state rather than a developmental state. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Although economic, political, ethnic and religious factors have led to regionalisms and other divides, causing civil strife and civil wars in many countries, in Botswana the north-south divide existed for a long time merely as a political undercurrent. However, the turn of the twenty-first century saw the explosion of issues motivated by perceptions that it was the north-south divide that caused imbalance in the provision of infrastructural development and ethnic inequality. This article traces the north-south divide in Botswana back to the early British colonial enterprise, when it was used for administrative convenience. Although in the post-colony the first president handled the situation pro-actively, his successors abandoned this approach. Regionalism ensued as personal ambitions for power and wealth took political and sometimes tribal dimensions. Ethnic identities were used to bolster campaigns despite the fact that identities in Botswana are multiple and multilayered rather than mutually exclusive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Botswana, a country two years shy of independence from Britain, is supposed to offer solace to the now displaced Bessie Head on a self-imposed exile from her native South Africa. The solace is supposed to provide a new beginning for the budding writer. However, Head's departure in March of 1964 for what would later become her adoptive country was, sadly enough, an ambiguous adventure at best. On the one hand, it offers her the basis for renewed hope in humanity for which she is grateful to her adoptive country. But, on the other hand, it ironically brings her yet again face to face with the old, recalcitrant demons of prejudice, an encounter far more unsettling in its stark horridness of entrance because of who the players are--victims and perpetrators alike--the Batswana themselves among whom she has come to launch her literary career and to predicate that career on charting a new course toward a redemptive world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a chronology of events related to Gaborone, Botswana. It highlights several events that occurred in Gaborone from 1957 through 2006 which provide details about the capital city with distinction between its national and local scope. Among the different events that were listed in a chronological order include the opening of Lady Liesching Health Centre in 1957, the demolition of the old District Commissioner's office from 1959-1960, and the declaration of Gaborone as a Township and a Township Authority in 1964. Moreover, the new Upper Mall Parkade in Gaborone was officially opened in 2006 along with the renovated Standard House.

This article proposes that anthropologists and historians of colonialism, landscape and the colonial construction of chieftaincy in Africa should examine particular case studies in more detail to elicit the complex social and material processes implicit in such notions. In particular it focuses upon the colonial conflation of the notions of settlement nucleation and sedentism in the period of the Bechuanaland Protectorate in Botswana (1885-1966), processes of material change, and the position of Tswana chiefs with regard to settlement and authority. The perceived "failure" of the Tawana chiefs in Ngamiland District to exert settlement control over the dispersed population is analyzed through detailed colonial records of conflict to argue that what failed was the colonial construction of chieftaincy itself, as well as the colonial imagination of landscape in Africa. The article's emphasis upon the materiality of dwelling in the landscape also seeks to convince historians and anthropologists alike of the vast research potential of material culture in the analysis of colonial histories, social and cultural change, and indigenous notions of modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the historical texts of the interviews done by students from the University of Botswana in the Tswapong Hills region of east-central Botswana in December 1979. Interviews as identity narratives; Overview of regional history; Shedding light on group boundary construction and changing political history; Concept of chieftainship.

An introduction to this issue of the journal is presented, which contains contributions on the history of Botswana and the Tswana people, most of which were originally delivered as papers at the 2013 meeting of the Southern African Historical Society (SAHS) historians' association in Gaborone, Botswana.