inBUSINESS Issue 14

efugees and displaying their arms caches,
his was a balancing act between pragmatism
and principle, a precarious situation that
Jesse Jackson summed up as Botswana being
“in the belly of the beast” when foreign
minister Gaositwe Chiepe brought home to
the American civil rights leader the reality of
living next to the world’s most unwanted and
dangerous neighbour.
Incidentally, the Jackson episode of
September 1986 is one that this writer
is much familiar with, having made an
impassioned extempore speech from atop
the main counter in the lobby of Gaborone
Sun soon after the American civil rights
leader and his 50-strong entourage arrived.
It would be a mark of the worst irony
imaginable, the speech went, if Jackson’s
party stayed at a place that often served as
the preferred venue - and therefore staging
platform - for commandos of apartheid
South Africa whenever they came to visit
death and destruction upon agents of change
and their hosts in Botswana, usually in the
dead of night.
At the end of this fervent intervention,
Moruti Jackson and his entire cortege
entered their rooms and quickly emerged
with their luggage that they loaded into the
vehicles of many Batswana who had gathered
to meet the widely popular clergyman and
veteran black leader.
And as though in a scripted scene,
the vehicles fell into a procession to the
African Mall where staff at a restaurant
run by an African American whipped up
an instantaneous meal to feed the crowd
that was now the size of guests at a village
wedding. To crown it all, the Jackson
episode became an outpouring of solidarity
and an occasion for widespread activism
as Batswana reached into their pockets
to pay for the fairly sumptuous dinner as
they listened to an impromptu address by
the celebrated American civil rights leader
himself.
But we digress and must now return to
our protective membrane. Ever calm and
resolute, it was during this difficult time
that Masire’s steady hand got to work to
arrange a meeting between PW Botha, the
finger-wagging prime minister of apartheid
South Africa, and Kenneth Kaunda, the
uncompromising Zambian leader who had
defiantly opened his c ountry for use by the
ANC and its armed wing, Umkhonto we
Sizwe, just outside Tlokweng in the sliver
of no-man’s land between South Africa and
Botswana in April 1982.
In enabling this meeting, called
bosberaad (bush conference) by the South
African press, Masire was emulating his
predecessor, Seretse Khama, who had
facilitated an epoch-making conference
between BJ Vorster and Kaunda aboard
a train on the Victoria Falls Bridge on 26
August 1975. The specially-built ‘peace train’
had caused quite a stir at Gaborone Station
where it slowly passed on its onward journey
to its rather odd destination on a suspended
bridge between unrecognised Rhodesia and a
leading Frontline State.
Unlikely as it seemed at the time, the
stage was set for greater things, especially for
the August 1989 meeting between Botha’s
successor, FW de Klerk, and Kaunda at the
nearby Zambian town of Livingstone. The
year 1989 would prove a watershed during
which PW Botha suffered a stroke that
effectively paved the way for the man who
wasted no time before releasing Nelson
Mandela from prison in February 1990, FW
de Klerk, marking a turning point in the
affairs of southern Africa.
Masire’s Botswana subsequently
played a central role in ushering in a new
dispensation in South Africa. To that end,
Gaborone was the venue for the first high
profile meeting between the ANC youth
league and Jeugkrieg, the youth organisation
of apartheid South Africa’s ruling National
Party at the time.
It was significant that although the
meeting was primarily a confidencebuilding
mechanism for the opposing youth
organisations, the towering figures of the
ANC’s Nelson Mandela and the PAC’s
Clarence Makwetu were present, doubtless
partly as a tentative measure to build bridges
between two of South Africa’s leading
liberation organisations in exile that had
been at variance with each other since 1959.
What better place than the “island of sanity
in a sea of madness?”
And then came the rupture of liberation
in 1994 and the overwhelming aura of
Nelson Mandela. Although the gloss was just
beginning to wear off partly as a result of
recalcitrant white supremacists, the euphoria
Picture: Thalefang Charles
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