Cosmopolitan Ethnicity, Entrepreneurship and the Nation: Minority Elites in Botswana

The build-up of inter-ethnic trust, partnerships and alliances by minority elites is a remarkable accomplishment, in the face of majoritarian fears of 'the takeover' and 'the hidden agenda' -the popular imagining of an ethnic conspiracy consciously directed by the few against the many. This article examines that inter-ethnic accomplishment and the entrepreneurship of nationally prominent Kalanga elites. Mainly former top civil servants turned entrepreneurs, originally from the north of Botswana, they are now the best-positioned minority elites in the capital in the south. The analysis resolves a linked set of apparent paradoxes. The first is that Kalanga elites merge urban cosmopolitanism with assertions of their ethnic identity, linguistic difference, distinct cultural heritage and ties to their rural homes. The second relates to the boundary-crossing legacies in the postcolonial present from the colonial and pre-colonial past: that Kalanga elites, coming from the borderland of Botswana and Zimbabwe, orient their ethnicity towards the nation and also beyond it, internationally. That super-tribalism and nation building in Botswana march ahead together, like moral comrades-in-arms, is the third paradox. More generally for postcolonial studies, the argument relates changes in ethnicity, inter-ethnicity and entrepreneurship to the transformation of the capable African state, tracing these changes through the administrations of Botswana's three presidents: from the heyday of assimilationist yet highly co-optive policy and One Nation Consensus under the first; through the second president's less co-optive rule, which appeared to foster the autonomy of the bureaucracy but, under a liberalisation policy, reduced the insulation between the civil service and the investment opportunities of business and high finance; and finally, under the current president, to the growing pressures for a shift towards greater pluralism in the postcolonial state.