‘A town new and modern in conception’: non-racial dreams and racial realities in the making of Gaborone, Botswana

ABSTRACT

Botswana has long been praised for its financial and political achievements. High economic growth rates and uninterrupted democratic governance since independence in 1966 have led to Botswana's labeling as the ‘African Miracle’. Long before Botswana's emergence as a darling of Western development agencies however, Tswana elites and colonial officials also saw Botswana as exceptional: surrounded by states divided along racial lines, these individuals sought to construct a nation organized around principles of racial and tribal unity. Aspirations of non-racialism were to be exemplified in Botswana's newly constructed capital city, Gaborone. At the same time, underlying the planning vision for Gaborone was a competing set of narratives, practices and aspirations that undercut these lofty ideals and resulted in the creation of a city highly stratified by racial segregation. This essay identifies three complementary urban planning rationales that produced urban exclusion in Gaborone: the desire to build Gaborone as an administrative capital, borrowing from both colonial and indigenous Tswana traditions that privileged spatial divisions related to status and race, and the goal to build a ‘modern’ urban center to lead Botswana into the future. These tensions divided the city in ways both familiar and unexpected and set the parameters determining who counts as a legitimate resident of the city. The paper, therefore, seeks to explore how a city founded on an ideal of racial unity instead became a site of stark division(s).

KEYWORDS:

• Gaborone
• Botswana
• Africa
• urban planning
• colonialism
• racial segregation

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank both the editors for the opportunity to participate in this special issue of Social Identities and the anonymous reviewers for the helpful comments and suggestions in improving the essay.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 These expectations turned out to be wildly off base. By 1975, the population of Gaborone had already doubled to over 34,000 people (Stephens, MacLiver, & Weimer-Stutze, 1977, p. 92). Please note that further clarification and details are available in my dissertation manuscript, from which much of the empirical material is drawn (Marr, 2008).

2 An expert technical officer from London who briefly visited the Protectorate to consult on the planning project advised that the initial expected population of Gaborone would be 5000 individuals. Two thousand of whom would be government officials and their dependents, while the remaining population would be composed of Africans who would provide services and support. See: Kenneth Watts, ‘The Planning of Gaberones, the New Capital for Bechuanaland: Report of an Advisory Visit: January 1963’ (Collected Files, ‘Gaberones Headquarters: Town Plan’, Botswana National Archives, File Reference Number S. 592/8, Gaborone, 1962–1963).

3 Worth noting is that the position of the immigrant differs from that of the serf. A foreigner, particularly someone from a neighboring Tswana tribe, would eventually be assimilated into the tribe completely, thus losing their ‘immigrant’ status and adopting the full array of privileges afforded by citizenship.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported in part by a Fulbright Dissertation Research Grant.