How did Botswana break the mold? By quickly developing inclusive economic and political institutions after independence. Since then, it has been democratic, holds regular and competitive elections, and has never experienced civil war or military intervention. The government set up economic institutions enforcing property rights, ensuring macroeconomic stability, and encouraging the development of an inclusive market economy. But of course, the more challenging question is, how did Botswana manage to establish a stable democracy and pluralistic institutions, and choose inclusive economic institutions, while most other African countries did the opposite? To answer this, we have to understand how a critical juncture, this time the end of colonial rule, interacted with Botswana’s existing institutions.
In most of sub-Saharan Africa—for example, for Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe—independence was an opportunity missed, accompanied by the re-creation of the same type of extractive institutions that existed during the colonial period. Early stages of independence would play out very differently in Botswana, again largely because of the background created by Tswana historical institutions. In this, Botswana exhibited many parallels to England on the verge of the Glorious Revolution. England had achieved rapid political centralization under the Tudors and had the Magna Carta and the tradition of Parliament that could at least aspire to constrain monarchs and ensure some degree of pluralism. Botswana also had some amount of state centralization and relatively pluralistic tribal institutions that survived colonialism. England had a newly forming broad coalition, consisting of Atlantic traders, industrialists, and the commercially minded gentry, that was in favor of well-enforced property rights. Botswana had its coalition in favor of secure procedure rights, the Tswana chiefs, and elites who owned the major assets in the economy, cattle. Even though land was held communally, cattle was private property in the Tswana states, and the elites were similarly in favor of well-enforced property rights. All this of course is not denying the contingent path of history. Things would have turned out very differently in England if parliamentary leaders and the new monarch had attempted to use the Glorious Revolution to usurp power. Similarly, things could have turned out very differently in Botswana, especially if it hadn’t been so fortunate as to have leaders such as Seretse Khama, or Quett Masire, who decided to contest power in elections rather than subvert the electoral system, as many postindependence leaders in sub-Saharan Africa did.
At independence the Tswana emerged with a history of institutions enshrining limited chieftaincy and some degree of accountability of chiefs to the people. The Tswana were of course not unique in Africa for having institutions like this, but they were unique in the extent to which these institutions survived the colonial period unscathed. British rule had been all but absent. Bechuanaland was administered from Mafeking, in South Africa, and it was only during the transition to independence in the 1960s that the plans for the capital of Gaborone were laid out. The capital and the new structures there were not meant to expunge the indigenous institutions, but to build on them; as Gaborone was constructed, new kgotlas were planned along with it.
Independence was also a relatively orderly affair. The drive for independence was led by the Botswana Democratic Party (BDP), founded in 1960 by Quett Masire and Seretse Khama. Khama was the grandson of King Khama III; his given name, Seretse, means “the clay that binds together.” It was to be an extraordinarily apt name. Khama was the hereditary chief of the Ngwato, and most of the Tswana chiefs and elites joined the Botswana Democratic Party. Botswana didn’t have a marketing board, because the British had been so uninterested in the colony. The BDP quickly set one up in 1967, the Botswana Meat Commission. But instead of expropriating the ranchers and cattle owners, the Meat Commission played a central role in developing the cattle economy; it put up fences to control foot-and-mouth disease and promoted exports, which would both contribute to economic development and increase the support for inclusive economic institutions.
Though the early growth in Botswana relied on meat exports, things changed dramatically when diamonds were discovered. The management of natural resources in Botswana also differed markedly from that in other African nations. During the colonial period, the Tswana chiefs had attempted to block prospecting for minerals in Bechuanaland because they knew that if Europeans discovered precious metals or stones, their autonomy would be over. The first big diamond discovery was under Ngwato land, Seretse Khama’s traditional homeland. Before the discovery was announced, Khama instigated a change in the law so that all subsoil mineral rights were vested in the nation, not the tribe. This ensured that diamond wealth would not create great inequities in Botswana. It also gave further impetus to the process of state centralization as diamond revenues could now be used for building a state bureaucracy and infrastructure and for investing in education. In Sierra Leone and many other sub-Saharan African nations, diamonds fueled conflict between different groups and helped to sustain civil wars, earning the label Blood Diamonds for the carnage brought about by the wars fought over their control. In Botswana, diamond revenues were managed for the good of the nation.
The change in subsoil mineral rights was not the only policy of state building that Seretse Khama’s government implemented. Ultimately, the Chieftaincy Act of 1965 passed by the legislative assembly prior to independence, and the Chieftaincy Amendment Act of 1970 would continue the process of political centralization, enshrining the power of the state and the elected president by removing from chiefs the right to allocate land and enabling the president to remove a chief from office if necessary. Another facet of political centralization was the effort to unify the country further, for example, with legislation ensuring that only Setswana and English were to be taught in school. Today Botswana looks like a homogenous country, without the ethnic and linguistic fragmentation associated with many other African nations. But this was an outcome of the policy to have only English and a single national language, Setswana, taught in schools to minimize conflict between different tribes and groups within society. The last census to ask questions about ethnicity was the one taken in 1946, which revealed considerable heterogeneity in Botswana. In the Ngwato reserve, for example, only 20 percent of the population identified themselves as pure Ngwato; though there were other Tswana tribes present, there were also many non-Tswana groups whose first language was not Setswana. This underlying heterogeneity has been modulated both by the policies of the postindependence government and by the relatively inclusive institutions of the Tswana tribes in the same way as heterogeneity in Britain, for example, between the English and the Welsh, has been modulated by the British state. The Botswanan state did the same. Since independence, the census in Botswana has never asked about ethnic heterogeneity, because in Botswana everyone is Tswana.
Botswana achieved remarkable growth rates after independence because Seretse Khama, Quett Masire, and the Botswana Democratic Party led Botswana onto a path of inclusive economic and political institutions. When the diamonds came on stream in the 1970s, they did not lead to civil war, but provided a strong fiscal base for the government, which would use the revenues to invest in public services. There was much less incentive to challenge or overthrow the government and control the state. Inclusive political institutions bred political stability and supported inclusive economic institutions. In a pattern familiar from the virtuous circle described in chapter 11, inclusive economic institutions increased the viability and durability of inclusive political institutions.
Botswana broke the mold because it was able to seize a critical juncture, postcolonial independence, and set up inclusive institutions. The Botswana Democratic Party and the traditional elites, including Khama himself, did not try to form a dictatorial regime or set up extractive institutions that might have enriched them at the expense of society. This was once again an outcome of the interplay between a critical juncture and existing institutions. As we have seen, differently from almost anywhere else in sub-Saharan Africa, Botswana already had tribal institutions that
had achieved some amount of centralized authority and contained important pluralistic features. Moreover, the country had economic elites who themselves had much to gain from secure property rights.
No less important, the contingent path of history worked in Botswana’s favor. It was particularly lucky because Seretse Khama and Quett Masire were not Siaka Stevens and Robert Mugabe. The former worked hard and honestly to build inclusive institutions on the foundations of the Tswanas’ tribal institutions. All this made it more likely that Botswana would succeed in taking a path toward inclusive institutions, whereas much of the rest of sub-Saharan Africa did not even try, or failed outright.
THE END OF THE SOUTHERN EXTRACTION
It was December 1, 1955. The city of Montgomery, Alabama, arrest warrant lists the time that the offense occurred as 6:06 p.m. James Blake, a bus driver, was having trouble, he called the police, and Officers Day and Mixon arrived on the scene. They noted in their report:
We received a call upon arrival the bus operator said he had a colored female sitting in the white section of the bus, and would not move back. We … also saw her. The bus operator signed a warrant for her. Rosa Parks (cf) was charged with chapter 6 section 11 of the Montgomery City Code.
Rosa Parks’s offense was to sit in a section of the Cleveland Avenue bus reserved for whites, a crime under Alabama’s Jim Crow laws. Parks was fined ten dollars in addition to court fees of four dollars. Rosa Parks wasn’t just anybody. She was already the secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the NAACP, which had long been struggling to change the institutions of the U.S. South. Her arrest triggered a mass movement, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, masterminded by Martin Luther King, Jr. By December 3, King and other black leaders had organized a coordinated bus boycott, convincing all black people that they should not ride on any bus in Montgomery. The boycott was successful and it lasted until December 20, 1956. It set in motion a process that culminated in the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that the laws that segregated buses in Alabama and Montgomery were unconstitutional.
The Montgomery Bus Boycott was a key moment in the civil rights movement in the U.S. South. This movement was part of a series of events and changes that finally broke the mold in the South and led to a fundamental change of institutions. As we saw in chapter 12, after the Civil War, southern landowning elites had managed to re-create the extractive economic and political institutions that had dominated the South before the Civil War. Though the details of these institutions changed—for example, slavery was no longer possible—the negative impact on economic incentives and prosperity in the South was the same. The South was notably poorer than the rest of the United States.
Starting in the 1950s, southern institutions would begin to move the region onto a much faster growth trajectory. The type of extractive institutions ultimately eliminated in the U.S. South were different from the colonial institutions of pre-independence Botswana. The type of critical juncture that started the process of their downfall was also different but shared several commonalities. Starting in the 1940s, those who bore the brunt of the discrimination and the extractive institutions in the South, people such as Rosa Parks, started to become much better organized in their fight against them. At the same time, the U.S. Supreme Court and the federal government finally began to intervene systematically to reform the extractive institutions in the South. Thus a main factor creating a critical juncture for change in the South was the empowerment of black Americans there and the end of the unchallenged domination of the southern elites.
The southern political institutions, both before the Civil War and after, had a clear economic logic, not too different from the South African Apartheid regime: to secure cheap labor for the plantations. But by the 1950s, this logic became less compelling. For one, significant mass outmigration of blacks from the South was already under way, a legacy of both the Great Depression and the Second World War. In the 1940s and ’50s, this reached an average of a hundred thousand people per year. Meanwhile, technological innovation in agriculture, though adopted only slowly, was reducing the dependence of the plantation owners on cheap labor. Most labor in the plantations was used for picking cotton. In 1950 almost all southern cotton was still picked by hand. But the mechanization of cotton picking was reducing the demand for this type of work. By 1960, in the key states of Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi, almost half of production had become mechanized. Just as blacks became harder to trap in the South, they also became no longer indispensable for the plantation owners. There was thus less reason for elites to fight vigorously to maintain the old extractive economic institutions. This did not mean that they would accept the changes in institutions willingly, however. Instead, a protracted conflict ensued. An unusual coalition, between southern blacks and the inclusive federal institutions of the United States, created a powerful force away from southern extraction and toward equal political and civil rights for southern blacks, which would finally remove the significant barriers to economic growth in the U.S. South.
The most important impetus for change came from the civil rights movement. It was the empowerment of blacks in the South that led the way, as in Montgomery, by challenging extractive institutions around them, by demanding their rights, and by protesting and mobilizing in order to obtain them. But they weren’t alone in this, because the U.S. South was not a separate country and the southern elites did not have free rein as did Guatemalan elites, for example. As part of the United States of America, the South was subject to the U.S. Constitution and federal legislation. The cause for fundamental reform in the South would finally receive support from the U.S. executive, legislature, and Supreme Court partly because the civil rights movement was able to have its voice heard outside the South, thereby mobilizing the federal government.
Federal intervention to change the institutions in the South started with the decision of the Supreme Court in 1944 that primary elections where only white people could stand were unconstitutional. As we have seen, blacks had been politically disenfranchised in the 1890s with the use of poll taxes and literacy tests (this page–this page). These tests were routinely manipulated to discriminate against black people, while still allowing poor and illiterate whites to vote. In a famous example from the early 1960s, in Louisiana a white applicant was judged literate after giving the answer “FRDUM FOOF SPETGH” to a question about the state constitution. The Supreme Court decision in 1944 was the opening salvo in the longer battle to open up the political system to blacks, and the Court understood the importance of loosening white control of political parties.
That decision was followed by Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, in which the Supreme Court ruled that state-mandated segregation of schools and other public sites was unconstitutional. In 1962 the Court knocked away another pillar of the political dominance of white elites: legislative malapportionment. When a legislature is malapportioned—as were the “rotten boroughs” in England before the First Reform Act—some areas or regions receive much greater representation than they should based on their share of the relevant population. Malapportionment in the South meant that the rural areas, the heartland of the southern planter elite, were heavily overrepresented relative to urban areas. The Supreme Court put an end to this in 1962 with its decision in the Baker v. Carr case, which introduced the “one-person, one-vote” standard.
But all the rulings from the Supreme Court would have amounted to little if they hadn’t been implemented. In the 1890s, in fact, federal legislation enfranchising southern blacks was not implemented, because local law enforcement was under the control of the southern elite and the Democratic Party, and the federal government was happy to go along with this state of affairs. But as blacks started rising up against the southern elite, this bastion of support for Jim Crow crumbled, and the Democratic Party, led by its non-southern elements, turned against racial segregation. The renegade southern Democrats regrouped under the banner of the States’ Rights Democrat
ic Party and competed in the 1948 presidential election. Their candidate, Strom Thurmond, carried four states and gained thirty-nine votes in the Electoral College. But this was a far cry from the power of the unified Democratic Party in national politics and the capture of that party by the southern elites. Strom Thurmond’s campaign was centered on his challenge to the ability of the federal government to intervene in the institutions of the South. He stated his position forcefully: “I wanna tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that there’s not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigra race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.”
He would be proved wrong. The rulings of the Supreme Court meant that southern educational facilities had to be desegregated, including the University of Mississippi in Oxford. In 1962, after a long legal battle, federal courts ruled that James Meredith, a young black air force veteran, had to be admitted to “Ole Miss.” Opposition to the implementation of this ruling was orchestrated by the so-called Citizens’ Councils, the first of which had been formed in Indianola, Mississippi, in 1954 to fight desegregation of the South. State governor Ross Barnett publicly rejected the court-ordered desegregation on television on September 13, announcing that state universities would close before they agreed to be desegregated. Finally, after much negotiation between Barnett and President John Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy in Washington, the federal government intervened forcibly to implement this ruling. A day was set when U.S. marshals would bring Meredith to Oxford. In anticipation, white supremacists began to organize. On September 30, the day before Meredith was due to appear, U.S. marshals entered the university campus and surrounded the main administration building. A crowd of about 2,500 came to protest, and soon a riot broke out. The marshals used tear gas to disperse the rioters, but soon came under fire. By 10:00 p.m. that night, federal troops were moved into the city to restore order. Soon there were 20,000 troops and 11,000 National Guardsmen in Oxford. In total, 300 people would be arrested. Meredith decided to stay on campus, where, protected from death threats by U.S. marshals and 300 soldiers, he eventually graduated.
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