Botswana: What Botswana’s elections say about Africa’s postcolonial headache | The Week

Botswana, a tiny landlocked country north of South Africa, held an election over the weekend. The result was a victory for the incumbent, the Botswana Democratic Party, but by the narrowest margin in the country’s electoral history. It was an alarming campaign. As Amy Poteete points out at The Washington Post, the run-up to the election featured some extremely ugly politics, including the death of an opposition politician under mysterious circumstances and the alleged kidnapping and torture of others by the security apparatus. One journalist fearing for his life fled to South Africa, and his editor was charged with sedition. Nevertheless, the election itself appears to have been free of overt fraud. To folks unfamiliar with the region, all this may seem like typical African politics. But Botswana has always been the great exception to the rule. It is the only country in the entire continent to have had free and fair elections since the end of colonial rule. But it seems even Botswana is now dealing with the same sort of postcolonial troubles that have afflicted most other African nations.

The history of Botswana’s transition to democracy is like something out of a fairy tale, and well worth recounting. The story begins in 1925, when Seretse Khama, at age 4, became king of the most powerful Tswana tribe in what was then called the Bechuanaland Protectorate. In the mid-1940s, he moved to Britain to study law. There he fell in love with a white British woman named Ruth Williams, and they married in 1948.

This caused a political crisis both in Bechuanaland and in South Africa. Many tribal elites at home naturally expected him to marry another Tswana. Meanwhile, South Africa was beginning to implement grand apartheid (which, of course, included laws against interracial marriage) and objected strongly at having a neighboring state run by an interracial couple.

Khama returned home with his new wife, where they managed to convince the tribal elders and the general population that the marriage was acceptable. But the Brits were heavily dependent on South African gold and uranium, so they exiled Khama and his wife from Bechuanaland. Khama wasn’t gone for long, however; after renouncing the throne, and backed by strong internal and international protests, he returned in 1956.