The queen is dead but it would be unrealistic to expect the 75-year old king to live long. Queen Elizabeth II seemed a nice old lady but in a highly unusual development, her death has provoked pent-up anger. Some see this anger as unjustified because she was only ceremonial head of a government that was helmed by politicians. In 1885, British politicians participated in the Berlin Conference at which European powers formally instituted colonialism by carving up Sub-Saharan Africa among themselves. However, while not so designated, colonialism was a crime against humanity and the queen represented an institution that was responsible for colonialism.
Colonialism did something even worse: it begot neo-colonialism, which continues the odious mission its parent started. The result has been that instead of remembering what a sweet old lady Queen Elizabeth was, much of the Third World remember how the institution that she represented destroyed and continues to destroy their societies. With regard to the latter, the issue becomes not one of Africans bearing a grudge about the past but of how that past still affects the present. With regard to Botswana, the most seminal work on the grievous harm that British colonialism did is that of Professor Monageng Mogalakwe, a researcher and consultant.
Long before Queen Elizabeth’s death, Mogalakwe (who has taught at the University of Botswana) wrote a deeply-sourced academic paper about how Britain purposefully underdeveloped the Bechuanaland Protectorate between 1885 and 1966. That is a total of 82 years, 14 of them during the reign of Queen Elizabeth. In the paper, Mogalakwe shows how the British “subverted indigenous economic interests and stifled opportunities for indigenous private capital accumulation, while actively promoting the economic interests of a small, white settler capitalist class.” He writes that the introduction of hut tax in 1899 precipitated an outflow of Tswana men to take up short-term employment in South African mines, mostly as face workers, as well as in agricultural farms.
He notes that “colonial officials were well aware that the introduction of such a tax would necessarily induce such an outflow of labour to South Africa. “The tax was not based on ability to pay and required cash payments, rather than payment in kind. The colonial officials were well aware that the economy of the country was predominantly based on subsistence agriculture, and that employment opportunities were limited,” Mogalakwe writes in a paper titled “How Britain Underdeveloped Bechuanaland Protectorate: A Brief Critique of the Political Economy of Colonial Botswana.” Those who couldn’t pay risked going to prison and so the only course of action was working in South African mines.
As Mogalakwe demonstrates, the resulting exodus set off a process of colonial capitalist underdevelopment of Bechuanaland. “Labour migration generally subverted and undermined the traditional forms of economic activity as many able-bodied men and women were no longer available to attend to the routine tasks of animal husbandry and arable production. [Isaac] Schapera points out that cattle were scattered with no one to look after them, fields were left to decay and covered with weeds, and huts were left unattended and tumbled down. At the level of the community, people experienced cultural shocks, such as when returning migrants shunned involvement in agricultural activities.”
By design, contract face workers were paid a pittance and engaged on short-term contracts. The Mines Native Wages Commission explicitly recommended the maintenance of a system under which the mines were able to obtain unskilled labour paid below the market rate because that ensured steady supply of desperate migrant labourers. The report determined that if subsidiary means of existence were to disappear, that would produce permanent workers “who would demand more wages” for their labour.
Mogalakwe writes that “there was certainly a very curious coincidence or overlapping of interests between the colonial officials and the mining houses in South Africa, which comprised very significant British investment.” The colonial government also put in place restrictions that were specifically designed to frustrate the entrepreneurship of indigenous people. The 1923 Credit Sales to Natives Proclamation restricted the borrowing capacity of “natives” to 35 pounds a year, restricted Batswana’s economic activities to agriculture, and reserved “modern” commercial activities for Europeans and Indians. “By the early 1930s, Europeans operated about 131 of the 155 trading licences, the rest being operated by Indians.
The same Europeans were also the principal wholesalers in all of Bechuanaland and had exclusive trade monopolies in places like Batawana, Kgalagadi, Ghanzi, and Gaborone districts as well as in the Tuli Block. The white traders also used their stores as cattle sales stations and labour recruitment centres,” says Mogalakwe, adding that Batswana who wanted to enter into commerce in the 1930s were faced with considerable opposition from the white settlers. Indigenous farmers were similarly exploited through an unequal exchange system known as “goodfors.”
In terms of the later, indigenous farmers selling agricultural goods to white store-owners were given a slip of paper indicating that such goods were “good for” a certain amount of imported European goods such as earrings, bracelets, tea, sugar, soap, and cloth. “But a slip of paper written ‘good for’ for the purchase of goods worth, say one pound, could be exchanged for goods worth far less than that. This unequal exchange system, which tied Tswana producers to certain store owners, enabled these store owners to make huge profits because Tswana consumers were compelled to buy overpriced goods.”
Not only did traders undervalue African products while overvaluing their own consumer goods, they also “refused to give African producers cash for their products, forcing some of them to go to the mines as labourers for the purpose of paying tax.” Ngamiland, Gantsi and some parts of central Bechuanaland were the hardest hit by this scam.
Bangwato Kgosikgolo and lover of the British, Khama III, was himself scammed by being muscled out of a business he had recapitalised. The muscling out was done by the Acting Resident Commissioner for the benefit of the Bechuanaland Trading Association (BTA), a large-scale enterprise with interests outside Bechuanaland and links to the British South Africa Company. While Europeans could trade anywhere through the general trading licence, indigenous people were permitted to trade solely in the socalled “African reserves” through the restricted dealerlicenceand were not allowed to do so in “Crown” lands like Lobatse, Francistown and Gaborone. Through Proclamation No.35 of 1938, the colonial government established tribal treasuries whose main sources of revenue included the Graded Tax, Native Tax, court fines, school fees, sale of school books and hunting permits.
Whilst local communities contributed almost 40 percent in direct taxation and even more indirectly through tribal levies, the European traders who controlled the trading and commercial sector were not taxed on their profits until the mid-1930s. The net effect of these and other colonial machinations was that “savings that were squeezed out of the Tswana economy through taxes were poured into the banks of the more developed economies of South Africa and Britain at very low interest rates.”
The Hut Tax enabled the colonial administration to balance its budget, which comprised its own recurrent administrative costs. The upshot of it all was that indigenous people “were manipulated to finance their own colonisation!” The social fabric that had held African societies together for centuries also began to fray. Mogalakwe says that returning migrant workers had become more individualistic and rebelled against conventional obligations to the community: “The traditional family unit had its own share of cultural shock as husbands deserted their wives, wives became unfaithful to their absentee husbands, sons deserted their families, and pre-marital pregnancies and single parentage became common as eligible young men were now almost permanent l y absent from home.”
Present-day Botswana lives with the consequences of British colonialism. The colonialism enabled the British to build as much economic power as to completely subjugate former colonies – and the looting continues. The African Progress Panel, which the late former Bank of Botswana Linah Mohohlo was a member of, has demonstrated how western generosity is a mere smoke-and-mirrors magic trick. According to the Panel, which is made up of 10 distinguished individuals from the private and public sector who advocate for equitable and sustainable development for Africa, for every $6 that comes into Africa as foreign aid, $10 was tricked out of the continent in the form of illicit financial flows.
All too often, that “aid” comes with conditions that are detrimental to the interests of the recipients. For example, a western nation could insist on a complete ban on corporal punishment, a highly effective method of indigenous guidance and counselling, in order for it to fund educational programmes in a recipient country.
