A few observations about Botswana after a day of wandering both the city center and the University of Botswana campus:
Gabarone is lovely. It is small, to be sure. There are really two main access roads, one leading in from one direction and heading out, one heading in from the other direction. The center of town is dominated by a pedestrian mall surrounded by shops and informal traders of the kind that one expects to see in most southern African cities and towns. Walking from the mall one can head toward the Gabarone of the capital — the government buildings, the parliament and executive offices and ministries and national archives and so forth. These buildings, like the rest of the city, are not spectacular but they are clean and well laid out and efficient.
I tend not to act much like a tourist, but I do try to remember to bring my camera with me, especially if I go someplace new.. I tend to be pretty bad about forgetting it because I go to South Africa so often that I don’t feel the need to act especially much like a tourist. And even in a new place I tend to take pictures on the sly — driving or walking by, stopping quickly and moving on. I don’t aim for art, I aim for documentation, though occasionally some of my pictures come out looking pretty fine despite myself..
That’s what I was doing today in the capital. Unobtrusively I’d take pictures of this statue or that baobob tree or that building. As I was walking by the Office of the President (Seretse Khama Ian Khama, the son of the legendary independence-era President Seretse Khama) and I took a quick snapshot. There are, mind you, no signs indicating that photographing government buildings is verboten. I am not even sure there actually any rules one way or the other. And Botswana generally and Gabarone more specifically hardly has a foreboding air about it. This is not Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.
But it is Ian Khama’s Botswana. And it must be noted that Ian Khama’s Botswana has, over the past couple of years, developed a tiny hint of Big Man creep. Nothing major, mind you. But there have been crackdowns subtle and not so subtle on the independent press and opposition politicians and in institutions such as the university. There are signs of discontent about Khama’s presidency throughout civic dialogue.
This all may be relevant or it may not be. In any case, one of the guards at the Office of the Presidency (whether he was police or military or secret service is hard to determine) came after me, first scolding me for taking pictures and then demanding that I go with him. We go into the entryway of the Office of the President (which is a sizeable building with myriad offices and I would suppose the general center of the executive branch in Botswana, though I did not get far enough to know) near the security checkpoint with the security belt and x-ray and the metal detector. My captor pulls aside his commanding officer, who continues to grill me about my picture taking. It does not, of course, help that my friend is a Zimbabwean in a country increasingly hostile to non-Tswana, though Mark tried to speak seTswana with them to mask his true interloper self. It was increasingly clear in this little exercise of petty power that the whole process was utterly arbitrary. I had to delete the picture of the Office of the Presidency building, and for reasons still unclear, two pictures of the seal of the country of Botswana that I had taken of another building. Yet I was not required to delete any of the other pictures of Botswana government buildings — not of the Parliament or ministries, not of the Botswana flag or even of the statue of Seretse Khama, though I must admit he had to think twice about that one.
This is, of course, minor stuff. I’ve encountered much worse examples of arbitrary authority in Africa, and I had to delete s eum total of three pictures (getting my revenge by doubling back for THREE more pictures of the seal). They did not try to take my camera, nor did they ask for the memory chip, nor did they threaten me or even act menacing. This is small potatoes stuff, the sort of thing that could easily have happened at a dmv in the United States and that would qualify as positively embracing behavior at the typical border crossing in this part of the world. But what if it had been Mark, and not me taking the pictures? What if this had been my first time in this part of the world and I had raised too much of a fuss, or not enough? (Being utterly acquiescent is usually as much a recipe for a long day as being too abrasive.)
As I say, it was a minor hassle, and is hardly the stuff of headlines, but it also brought to mind one other issue. One of the complaints of many locals, including some fairly prominent members of the press, is the fact that the boom of the World Cup in neighboring South Africa seems to have passed Botswana by. Gabarone is right next door, should be a gateway to the rest of the country, particularly the Okavango Delta region, the de facto capital of which is Maun. Now it is possible that Maun and its environs actually has seen a rise in tourism from the World Cup and Gabarone would be blissfully unaware — after all, one can fly straight on to Maun from Joburg. Nonetheless, among the criticisms is that the government simply did not work to make Gabarone a place for tourists to come. This is to say the critics do not blame South Africa for excluding the rest of the region (well, they kind of do, but that’s another story) but rather they blame their government for assuming that the magic water from World Cup mountain would run from the peaks of Gauteng and Cape Town down to quaint little Gabarone.
It never happened. But I do have to wonder what either the critics or the government might have thought would occur if masses of tourists did descend on Gabarone with their cameras, cameras that have taken pictures of the White House and Pentagon, Westminster and 10 Downing, and even Tiananmen and Red Squares. Cameras that just recently took pictures of Parliament in Cape Town and the Union Buildings in Pretoria. The head honcho who held me while determining the fate of me and my Canon afterward was quite concliatory, saying “security concerns, you know.” But the realities of the mean streets and high-profile target that is Gabarone probably does not quite stir the sort of fear and portent into Americans or Brits or anyone else that the local security forces might think, especially when the whole thing just seems so damned capricious and absurd.
So I’m a potential security threat in Botswana, though they never bothered to take my name down, which means I am free to continue to plot my nefarious designs.
As for the World Cup itself, I have spoken to more locals about this. Most are excited, if from a one step removal. Ghana has excited many of the fans although most with whom I spoke now favor Brazil, which should not be taken as any sort of statement about their support for Africa hosting the Cup or African teams in the Cup: Everyone everywhere supports Brazil, it seems, especially once their team is booted. It is in Brazil’s nature to be everyone’s (other than the Brazilians’, of course) second favorite team.
I am now back at the University of Botswana, where I spent a couple of hours earlier getting the insider tour of campus, which is pretty big given that it only serves a few thousand students. It is also growing imnpressively with a massive building book expanding the already sprawling periphery of campus. I mention the building particularly to emphasize one other way in which Botswana is part of larger trends in Africa: all of the construction is being carried out by Chinese firms, as is the work on the National Stadium, a nice, if slightly utilitarian facility with a bright blue track (poweder blue, the ian color of the national flag, team kit, and so forth) surrounding the main field, which hosts the Zebras, the Botswana national football team, andI believe the rugby team as well. Let there be no mistake — China’s influence in Africa is immense and it’s not going to get any smaller. This is not intended to be foreboding — the issue is complex and for now I’ll leave it at that.
