The still-born rapprochement between Germany and representatives of Herero, Mbanderu and Nama leaders in Namibia captured a whole news cycle a fortnight ago and will in the future. Beginning in 1904 until 1908, in what was then called German South West Africa, German troops slaughtered Herero, Mbanderu and Nama in an unmistakable ethnic cleansing campaign that some say was a dress rehearsal for what Adolf Hitler would do to Jews a few decades later. In an ill-conceived deal that excluded victim communities in the Diaspora, Germany has offered 1.1 billion euros as reparations for that holocaust. Another set of leaders from victim communities in Botswana, Namibia and South Africa, is pushing back really hard against that deal and at this point, all signs point to negotiations going back to square one.
However, there is a similar, still-under-the-radar campaign that could potentially impoverish western Europe when (not if) it becomes successful. This campaign goes back decades when African-Americans, some of them legislators, called for the establishment of a commission to study and develop reparation proposals for African-Americans. That effort has begun to bear fruit: politically, reparations have become a platform issue and some federal, state and local administrations in the United States have initiated reparation processes. On February 21 last year, California assembly member Shirley Weber introduced a bill to establish a task force to study and develop reparation proposals for African-Americans. The bill was approved and entered into force seven months later.
In Africa, such campaign formally began in 1992 when a group of Eminent Persons, operating under the auspices of the African Union, formally requested colonial powers to pay African countries reparations for the irreversible harm they have done to their respective societies. This group was led by Nigerian businessman and former president-elect Chief Bashorun Moshood Abiola and included Kenyan academic Ali Mazrui, a US congressman, economists, historians, politicians, as well as South African singer and activist Miriam Makeba. There is yet no consensus on how much European powers should pay Africa as reparations for colonization but figures range from $100 trillion (academic Daniel Tetteh Osabu-Kle, 2000) to $777 trillion (Truth Commission, Ghana, 1999) to $777 trillion.
The calculations will vary widely but in the particular case of Botswana, scholarly work, such as that rendered by Professor Monageng Mogalakwe will be very useful when figures have to be toted up. Walter Rodney, the late Caribbean scholar, has done seminal work in the form of a book about how Europe under-developed Africa. Adopting the same analytical approach, Mogalakwe, late of the University of Botswana, has done work as seminal in the form of an academic paper about how Britain purposefully under-developed the Bechuanaland Protectorate between 1885 and 1966.
In the paper, he 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.”
Those with a superficial understanding of Botswana’s colonial history know that Batswana sought “protection” from Queen Victoria. In itself, the protection issue is not that straightforward. Prior to 1885, Batswana dikgosi sought protection but were persistently rebuffed. Only when they realised the military-strategic importance of what was then Bechuanaland, did the British unilaterally create the Bechuanaland Protectorate. Contrary to what is still taught in schools, the much-touted “protectorate” was actually British economic interests and not the life, limb and property of indigenous communities.
Mogalakwe 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.”
Those who couldn’t pay risked going to prison and so there was only course of action – 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,” he writes in a paper titled “How Britain Underdeveloped Bechuanaland Protectorate: A Brief Critique of the Political Economy of Colonial Botswana.”
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 this exchange system, an indigenous farmer would bring his cattle or bags of grain to a white-owned trading store for sale and would be given a slip of paper indicating that his beast or bag of grain was ‘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 kgosi and lover of the British, Khama III, was himself scammed. In 1909, a Serowe-based trading partnership, Garrett, Smith and Co., invited him onboard in order that he could help re-capitalise the company. Khama kept his end of the bargain, recapitalizing the company and in the process, enabled it to take over or support the accounts of smaller trading outlets in the Ngwato and Tawana Reserves and also saved a number of other smaller traders from bankruptcy. Resultantly, Garrett, Smith and Co. became the largest trading concern in Gammangwato but a threat to the Bechuanaland Trading Association (BTA), a large-scale enterprise with interests outside Bechuanaland and links to the British South Africa Company in Southern and NorthWestern Rhodesia. BTA’s local white manager, Paul Jousse, “started a vicious campaign to discredit Garrett, Smith and Co., claiming that the company was a monopoly and that consumers were boycotting his stores because of Khama’s loyal influence, forgetting that it was the same BTA that had enjoyed the monopoly of being the largest concern and former Khama’s bankers.” Ultimately, the colonial government interceded on BTA’s behalf. The Acting Resident Commissioner instructed Khama to withdraw from all trading interests, and did not even allow the Bangwato kgosi to sell his shares.
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. Additionally, tribal levies such as the 1941 War Levy were also imposed from time to time. Money from the war levy imposed in 1941 went into British government revenues, was used to buy gifts for men serving on the front with the African Auxiliary Pioneer Corps, and the balance was loaned (interest-free) to the British government, “presumably to finance a war effort that had nothing to do with the Bechuanaland Protectorate.”
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. Charles Rey, who was Resident Commissioner between 1929 and 1937, observed that the Hut Tax “will help natives to get a little money which they badly need, and will enable the administration to get a certain amount of additional hut tax which they need no less badly.” 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.
Writes Mogalakwe: “By the early 1940s Bechuanaland was already experiencing balance of trade deficits, as a result of a slowdown in domestic production brought about by the outflow of productive labour to the mines. The long-term effects of this were the destruction of both the material and social basis for indigenous capital accumulation.”
The colonial administration required that the tribal authorities should maintain surplus revenue equal to six months of ordinary expenditures. They were also legally required to set aside in a Special Reserve, one half of their yearly revenue. 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.”
For Botswana alone, even $777 trillion wouldn’t be adequate compensation for these wrongs. At this point in time, Botswana, like all other African countries, lacks the power to make Britain pay. However, as the cliché says, Africa is rising and when it has risen high enough and has enough power, Africa will make Europe pay and pay dearly. This may take decades, centuries even, but down the road Europe will pay and the figure will be way above $777 trillion.
