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 20th 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.
