The outrage over the blatant racism that poet Berry Heart alleges she suffered in Kasane should give one pause considering that no less personages than two sitting tourism ministers have suffered almost similar ordeal.
Years ago in private conversation, a former tourism minister recalled to the writer a highly unusual reception at a luxury safari camp deep in the Okavango Delta. Racially, he and a former Botswana Defence Force commander were the odd men out in a lily-white party visiting the camp.
The owner of the camp, also white, did an unimpressive job of hiding his displeasure that the black men were part of this party. His disdain became much more pronounced as the day wore on.
The trust level at these sort of places is so high that guests get drinks from a self-service bar and make entries in a register book at the counter. The party occupied an open-air area set a little way off the bar and one by one, the guests (as well as the camp owner who had joined this party) would get up, walk the short distance to the bar to get drinks and rejoin the chatty pack. The minister noticed that when he and the BDF commander would get drinks from the bar, the white safari operator would be watching furtively and when they came back, would go to the bar to check whether their entries were correct. He was himself drinking and so naturally after some three or so hours had enough Dutch courage to confront one unwelcome guest. When the minister made his umpteenth visit to the bar, the owner came up behind and out of earshot of the main party, asked: “You people are supposed to have cattleposts; why aren’t you at your cattlepost?”
The minister remembered telling him that if he wanted to go to the cattlepost he would have done so but had chosen not to. He followed up with some bluntly assertive words to convey his displeasure and his tormentor backed off. Later, the minister espied the owner talking to one of his black employees and noticed that both stealing glances at the merrymaking party. When he rejoining the group, the owner was suddenly friendly towards the black men and would later slap the minister familiarly on the back, quipping: “Hey minister, that was a joke.” A joke indeed, one that, like all racially harmless jokes, begins with “You people.” The minister would later establish that his and the BDF commander’s identity had been revealed by the black employee.
Fast forward to some seven years later, in the course of another private conversation about the blatant racism in the tourist industry and to buttress a point he was making, the writer told the above account second-hand to the sitting tourist minister. It turned out that was not necessary because the minister told of his own experience with racism. He too was in the Delta and was asking a white camp owner some questions about his operation. On the other hand, the latter was not keen on talking to the inquisitive stranger, was more interested in talking to white tourists and barely concealed his disdain. Finally, the minister reached into his pocket, took out a business card, gave it to the camp owner and asked him to give him a call if he ever found the time. All of a sudden, the man became cloyingly friendly and forgot about everything and everybody else around him to concentrate fully on the minister.
The racism of tourist hotspots comes to be topical because poet Berry Heart alleges that she suffered racism at the hands of a white guest at a Kasane lodge. We are given to believe that the guest threw a bottle in the direction of Berry Heart and her female friends, degraded their dignity by using highly sexualized language about them and to boot, threatened to kill them.
“I will kill you and no one can say anything. White people have arrived in Kasane to take over. What do you want here? Thebe Safari Lodge is for white people,” the white man is alleged to have said.
While the lodge has distanced itself from the incident, the issue will not go away. Berry Heart belongs to the social media generation and soon after her ordeal, she shared her story on the Internet. Immediately, the social media’s Outrage River came down in flood, prompting reams of critical editorial copy in newspapers. The magnitude of the issue is such that tourism minister, Tshekedi Khama, has had to call Berry Heart to assure her that he will get to the bottom of the matter.
Ultimately though, the minister’s assurance and intervention comes to nought because Botswana, a country with an ugly history of racial segregation, has no institutional architecture for responding to racism. The allegations that Berry Heart has made seem adequate enough to raise duty to investigate but by her account, the Kasane police were overly chummy with the culprit and sought to discredit her story.
Going back decades, there has always been a deep negative association between tourist hotspots and racism. Circumstances don’t suggest one should be hopeful for a better tomorrow. At the mouth of the Okavango Delta is a small, dirt-poor village where safari tour operators from Maun are spoiled for choice of cheap labour. The operators bring truckloads of tourists, stop off at the village to pick up polers, then proceed to the mouth of the delta where the latter ferry the tourists to an island deep in the delta in small dug-out canoes. One operator (a man from New Zealand whose story was reported in the press) would not make the village stop because, as the residents told the writer, “he says that we are dirty.”
What the New Zealander did was carve out his own path, which the residents named after him, that deviated from the road to village and went straight to the mouth of the delta. Those looking for a poling job with his company would meet him there. In addition to transporting and setting up camp for the tourists, those who ultimately got that job ÔÇô some elderly men in their 60s, were required to provide entertainment by dancing for the mostly young tourists. The operator’s explanation was that this was part of a cultural exchange programme because in turn, the tourists showcased their own western dances. However, none of the polers could recall the tourists breakdancing for them.
In the wake of the Berry Heart’s sojourn gone wrong in Kasane, all manner of suggestions have been made about how to fight racism, one being that flogging the culprits at the kgotla might be helpful. Here is another: creating safe spaces for black people (not blacks-only but black-owned and black-friendly places in tourist hotspots) where black patrons would not be subjected to racial abuse. In a sense both literal and figurative, Black America did that across a wide spectrum of fields to attain for black people there, the dignity that the government promises but is unable to deliver. To be clear, not all white-owned places treat black guests dastardly but the problem lies in knowing which ones have an unwritten whites-only policy.
The Okavango Delta would still present a challenge with regard to creating such spaces. During the pre-election debates on GabZ FM, Maun West parliamentary candidates lamented that all tourist operations in the Delta are owned by white people. None of them want to give up the concessions allocated to them because half of Hollywood and the world’s royalty holiday there.
The challenge for those creating and operating black-friendly places would be to maintain the right customer service standards – which is standard practice with most white-owned hospitality establishments. Truth be told, standards at a bad number of citizen-owned establishments (especially what are supposed to be high-end restaurants) are atrocious. Such situation results in value-for-money black customers patronizing white-owned places. The danger with the latter is fetching up in the wrong places that have an unwritten whites-only policy and being treated like used contraceptives.
