Cattle in the streets, lions in the classroom

02 August 2013 - 03:33 By Jonathan Jansen
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Sir Seretse Khama, his white English wife and their brood in 1964
Sir Seretse Khama, his white English wife and their brood in 1964
Image: AFRICA MEDIA ONLINE

AS THE small plane dips into Gaborone for my first visit to Botswana, I could not have chosen better reading material to remind me of the historic significance of this country.

AS THE small plane dips into Gaborone for my first visit to Botswana, I could not have chosen better reading material to remind me of the historic significance of this country.

Bop Hepple, one of Nelson Mandela's former lawyers, tells the story in his new book, Young man with a red tie: A memoir of Mandela and the failed revolution,of how during the struggle years the natives built a makeshift ladder across the border fence, allowing comrades to steal into exile as they escaped official harassment.

Comrades and citizens were killed in equal measure as apartheid brutality illegally crossed the border into the villages and homes of this independent state.

It is a strange country, Bechuanaland, as this former British Protectorate was once called. The capital city is flat and sparsely populated with generally clean, wide, well-tarred roads and not a pothole in sight.

Cattle roam freely along the main roads of the city. Everything moves slowly here; "the pastoral lifestyle", explains an African expat who has lived here forever, "and the heat; you move slowly to preserve energy".

This does not help my blood pressure as two sleepy customs agents take their time dealing with the long, long lines of passengers.

No such laxity for the Chinese, though. There must be few African countries in which the Chinese are more visibly erecting bright and shining tall buildings, almost literally overnight.

The new superpower is wasting no time establishing itself in this small but stable mining economy.

President Ian Khama has a huge photograph of himself hanging in every civil service office and in every school visited. He is wifeless, the locals inform me, and my thoughts involuntarily drift back to home. With the oversensitive racial goggles of a South African, I cannot help but notice in the light-skinned face a powerful reminder of how his courageous father, Sir Seretse Khama, married a white Englishwoman, much to the consternation of race-obsessed states in the region, but also some of the tribal elders at home.

"Why," I ask the natives, "does Botswana seem so relaxed around the politics of skin when it caused so much havoc in the states around you?"

It was not a typical colony with racial rule imposed by law and custom on every facet of social life; and then there was the first democratic president whose public choice of a life mate took this small country in the opposite direction to its neighbours, where racial identities were becoming even more deeply embedded in the consciousness of all citizens.

"Just imagine PW Botha married Winnie Mandela during those days," says one of my company, a man clearly not skilled in the discipline of comparative thought.

But it is the schools that surprise me. Botswana performs relatively better than South Africa in every measure of achievement, from science and mathematics to literacy and common sense.

The reasons are simple: this government takes education seriously; there are no destructive teacher unions that shut the poorest schools for weeks on end; and there is a strong government at the centre that steers the country, using development vehicles such as an "education hub" that heavily funds the best students for advanced post-school studies anywhere in the world.

At one stage about 8000 young people from Botswana were liberally funded to study in South Africa alone. Here excellence matters, and while all is not well in some of their schools, you are aware of the constant drive by the leadership to genuinely improve the school system.

When I look at how a small country values excellence - this is the sole value statement on which its national examination council drives its mandate - I feel a sudden sadness come over me.

We South Africans are stuck in a language of misery; we put a spin on Grade 12 results to make ourselves look good when the bottom three-quarters of the school system is rotten.

I remind my Botswana compatriots that the top undergraduate student at my university is an actuarial science graduate who hails from one of the local schools. That is the reason for my visit, to recruit hundreds more students like the tall, elegant and very smart Tumelo Morere, who now co-leads the 33000 student body. Training their youth is the least we can do for and with Botswana as a small token of appreciation for the burden they once carried on our behalf.

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