A Love Letter to Botswana
I got sick in Gaborone in a way I would not recommend to anyone. A viral infection and food poisoning arrived within a day of each other, and between them they reduced my world to the width of a bed. Standing up became a thing I had to plan in stages. I remember lying there doing quiet arithmetic about the distance to the bathroom, the ceiling holding very still above me, the day passing in the ordinary way outside a window I could not be bothered to look out of. I was some thousands of miles from anyone who had known me longer than a few weeks.
What happened next is the reason I am writing any of this down.
Colleagues at ACHAP drove me to the hospital. Not once, which would have been a kindness worth remembering. Several times, across several days, which is a different category of thing. One of them in particular kept appearing, waited with me, and conducted the whole business with the mild competence of a man handling something that was obviously his to handle. It was not his to handle. It appeared in no one’s job description, it would have shown up in no trip report, and nobody was keeping score. There was a person in his city who could not get out of bed, and as far as he was concerned that closed the matter.
I have turned this over many times since, mostly because of how unremarkable everyone involved seemed to find it. There is a version of this essay in which those car rides become a story about my own frailty and what it taught me, and I have no intention of writing it. The car rides were not about me. They were a small and ordinary expression of something the country has arranged itself around, and I would like to try to describe it without pressing it flat.
The word people offered me, when I asked, was botho. I will not pretend to full command of it. As it was explained to me, it names something like dignity held in common, the sense that a person becomes a person through the way they carry other people, and it sits in Botswana’s own language of national purpose rather than arriving as a visitor’s borrowing. It is not hospitality. Hospitality is a performance arranged around a guest and folded away afterward. This was closer to a standing obligation that happened, that week, to have me inside its circumference.
What surprised me was how far into the institutions you can follow it.
Begin with the exile, because everything after it is more legible in its light. In 1950 the British government removed Seretse Khama from Bechuanaland, the man who by any reasonable expectation would lead his people, because he had married an Englishwoman named Ruth Williams, and because apartheid South Africa and Southern Rhodesia could not abide the sight of it across a border. Six years passed. The price of coming home was giving up the chieftaincy altogether. The script waiting for him was the obvious one, grievance converted patiently into personal power, and it was the script much of the region went on to follow. He set it down and wrote another. Elections with a genuine opposition in 1965, before independence had even arrived. An opposition he left standing. A constitution he spent none of the following decade rearranging around himself.
He was born on the first of July, 1921, in Serowe, which is also my birthday, a coincidence I did not know had been made a public holiday until I was already living there.
The part I find most quietly stirring is the part with no cinema in it at all. Diamonds were found at Orapa in 1967, which is to say after independence, so it was a sovereign government and not a colonial concession-holder that sat down to negotiate terms. Botswana came away with half of Debswana and improved on the arrangement over the years that followed. Then, having secured the money, the government proceeded to do the dull thing. It bound itself to a rule that mineral revenue could pay for investment but not for the ordinary appetites of the state, and it built a fund to hold what was left over. Fiscal discipline is not a subject anyone writes love letters about. It is nonetheless the reason the money became clinics and classrooms rather than statuary and aircraft.
I noticed this through my work rather than despite it. Botswana’s clinic network is dense in a way that is difficult to feel until you set the facilities against the places people actually live, and then it is difficult to unfeel. That density is not weather. It is a series of budget decisions taken in the 1970s, still visible on a map half a century later, still sitting where they were put. The hospital I was driven to on those days I could not stand exists because people who would never meet me settled, decades in advance, the question of what the diamonds were for. It is an odd inheritance to find yourself holding.
The harder chapter is the one that made the institution my colleagues work for. Through the late 1990s and into the 2000s, HIV prevalence among adults in Botswana reached a level with no real precedent in a stable and functioning middle-income state, and life expectancy fell by more than a decade, which is the sort of statistic that means a generation of funerals. President Mogae said in public that the country faced the threat of extinction, and he was not reaching for effect. The answer was Masa, launched in 2002, the first free universal antiretroviral program on the continent, and ACHAP took shape out of the same emergency. So the men who kept driving me to the hospital work for an organization that exists because their country, at the worst hour it has had, refused to write its own people off.
None of which turns Botswana into a brochure. Inequality there is severe, unemployment has been stubborn for as long as I have been alive, and the diamonds that paid for everything rest on a narrower footing now than they did. I am not writing an audit and would not be the person to deliver one. I only mean that a place can carry real trouble and still have got the important things right.
Which brings me to October 2024, when the party of Seretse Khama lost an election after fifty-eight years in office. Mokgweetsi Masisi conceded before the counting had finished, said the people had spoken, and went home. Duma Boko was sworn in a few days later. The willingness to hand over power is the one civic virtue that cannot be demonstrated in advance, only when the moment arrives. That week the moment arrived.
I got sick in a country where people I barely knew decided I was theirs to look after, and it seems to me that the instinct behind those car rides is the same one that put the clinics where they are, wrote the rule about the diamonds, and let go of power when the counting was done. I have tried to hold the affection and the admiration apart, on the grounds that they are different things and I ought to be able to tell them from each other. I have not managed it.