Happy Botswana Independence Day, Everyone

Happy Botswana Independence Day, Everyone!

Across the Atlantic Ocean, in a dusty village south of the Tropic of Capricorn, a few hours from the border with South Africa, our daughter Dia has been up all night with her neighbors singing and praying and cooking, as apparently most of Botswana’s two million people are doing, to celebrate fifty years of independence.

Botswana isn’t a place you hear of much in the news. It’s a big country, about the size of Texas. It’s very sparsely populated, and a lot of it is given over to the forbidding Kalahari desert. It’s got the largest inland delta in the world (two years ago I didn’t even know there were such things), and the most numerous elephant herd of any country in the world.

On the subject of elephants - Paul Allen, who founded Microsoft along with Bill Gates, recently paid for a crew of scientists to fly small planes all over Africa and count elephants, and his Great Elephant Census reports that there are about 130,000 elephants in Botswana.

I don’t have Paul Allen’s money, but we did go to Botswana earlier this year, and one afternoon I stopped our pickup truck on a dusty sand track near the Chobe River because an elephant had just emerged from the bush right in front of us. I shut off the engine (the only prudent response when a six-ton mammal lumbers anywhere in your general direction). Then I began to count.

Seventy four.

Seventy four elephants paraded in front of us on their way to the river that morning. That is a lot of elephants. In Botswana the elephant herd is growing – and that’s not the only thing. The preservation of wildlife has made the country a magnet for tourists around the world, a boom that employs one in every 20 working age Batswana (that’s what you call a citizen of Botswana).

Driving around Botswana (the highways are modern even by US standards) you see a country undergoing rapid growth. Stopping for breakfast in a chain restaurant in Francistown, the first thing the waitress asked me was if I wanted the wi-fi code. (Sure, I said, but mostly I needed coffee – the Bats do not share my addiction to caffeine). As we drove from Dia’s village back to the capital of Gabarone, (a city without stoplights as recently as 1989) a colleague of hers told us that the four-hour trip, again along a splendid highway, would have taken 10 or 12 hours just a few years back.

Botswana has some advantages that other post-colonial African nations do not. Landlocked and sparsely populated, it was not considered a prize by predatory European colonists, who preferred to pounce on South African and Namibian mines and coastland. Botswana asked to become a British protectorate in the early 20^th century, and then dissolved the pseudo-colonial relationship with a handshake fifty years ago.

A year later they discovered the diamonds. It was like finding a winning lottery ticket in your pockets as you sort laundry.

The first President, Seretse Khama (whose two sons now serve as President and Minister of Tourism) had been disowned by his own tribe when he married a white British woman. Khama’s interracial marriage also greatly irritated apartheid South Africa. As a result, Khama set out to develop a national, not tribal, political base, and a multi-racial democracy. He let foreign companies bid on mining rights to the diamonds under terms favorable to Botswana, and invested the funds in public health, education and infrastructure. This served the country well and by the mid 1970’s Botswana was doing well enough to ask the Peace Corps to cease and desist in its development efforts.

Then came HIV. As many as one in four adults in Botswana were infected in the early years of the epidemic. Life expectancy dropped from first world levels (65 years on average) to below 40 years. In 1995, a 15-year-old in Botswana had a 50% chance of dying from an AIDS related illness.

Botswana responded to the epidemic slowly at first, but in time adopted educational, treatment, and preventive measures that are considered models for other countries.

Since 2002 it has been policy for the government to make anti-retroviral medications available free of charge, and nearly 70% of those infected are receiving the life-saving drugs. And Dia’s work with the Peace Corps is a part of that effort, one that makes her mother and I smile with pride.

So tonight, if you hear dancing and singing late into the night in a tongue that only the most devoted non-natives can master (we hear that Dia has gotten very good at it!), raise a glass to Bots 50, a proud moment for a small country that is trying, against some pretty heavy odds, to do right by its people.