31 Oct Botswana — Things that Wouldn’t Happen in America

Our second year in Botswana started with a film festival at one of the local schools, and Peggy and I went. Quett Masire, the second president of the country was there, along with all the opposition leaders who’d wanted to be president but hadn’t made the cut: the people who’d founded the country, and the people who’d wanted to found it differently, assembled in a high-school auditorium to watch movies about themselves.

A documentary crew had gone around and filmed everybody who was still alive, and that was most of them, in whatever place they wanted to be filmed. Usually out at the family cattle post, so there were a lot of cows shuffling around in the background. That was pure Botswana. You can be president, you can have shepherded your people through Independence and into a prosperous, stable democracy that’s the envy of almost every other country in Africa, but it’s the number of cows you have that brings esteem to the hearts of your countrymen.

Peggy and I arrived early, slid as far to the middle of a row of seats as we could get, and sat next to a casually dressed Motswana. “Hi,” he stuck out a hand. “I’m Quett Masire.”

Quett Masire? We were sitting next to Quett Ketumile Joni Masire?

Quett Masire, former president of Botswana and, to my mind, one of the greatest presidents ever. Quett Masire was the man who, more than any other, set Botswana along the path to democracy.

I have this theory about second presidents in newly independent countries. The first president is the one who leads his people to independence and he almost always stays in office until he’s too dead to keep running things. That leaves it up to the second president to establish the institutions that turn the country away from one-man rule. In Botswana, that was Quett Masire. He was vice president when Seretse Khama died, finished out the term, was elected to a couple of his own and, a year before his second term was up, stepped down. Because he didn’t think it was proper to add the last year of President Khama’s term to his own time in office.

Once, while he was still vice president, he flew to an international conference expecting to be met at the plane. When nobody showed up, he went inside the terminal and got busted for not having a passport.

He spent the next seven hours trying to prove who he was. The country had been expecting him, the Immigration people said. They’d lined up a band to welcome him, but he hadn’t gotten off the plane, so they’d sent the band home. Now that they mentioned it, Masire had noticed a band, but it had been up at the first-class section and he’d flown tourist. Quett Masire wasn’t about waste his peoples’ money on first class plane tickets.

It turned out that we had a friend in common, an old colonial officer. “You know,” President Masire said, “that man saved my life.”

Quett Masire thought of himself as a farmer, but a lot of politicians say that. George Washington thought of himself as a farmer, but he was much better at being president. Quett Masire actually was a farmer, one of the first really successful black farmers anywhere south of the Zambezi. Our mutual friend had brought him a pair of Levis when he returned from a trip to America. American Levis were very sought-after in Botswana.

“One day I was laying out a fence,” he told me. “The corners were marked by these concrete monuments with spikes sticking out the top. I was working in the air over one of them, when I slipped. The crotch of the Levis caught on a hook and I swung there upside down until I was rescued. Those Levis saved my life.”

Festus Mogae was president while we were in Botswana. Once, a class of Peggy’s Peace Corps volunteers had finished their tours and were getting ready to return to America. They’d wanted to meet President Mogae, but the schedules hadn’t worked out. A couple of them were sitting on the curb when his motorcade happened by. One of the volunteers wrote her cellphone number on the back of a menu she’d swiped from a restaurant, along with a note about how they wished they’d had the chance to meet him. Then handed it to his security people, and that was that.

Or that would have been that in almost any other country in the world but, a few hours later while she was at the hotel pool, her phone rang. She didn’t recognize the number, so she ignored it. When she didn’t answer President Mogae or, more likely, one of his people, called Peggy and invited the departing volunteers to drop by his office.

One afternoon, I motored up uninvited to the front door of the White House. That’s what they call the place where the president lives, the White House. I’d gotten disoriented in a part of town I wasn’t familiar with when I spotted the building I was trying to get to. The road I was on went straight there. Or it would have, if it hadn’t been for the gate with a sign telling me do not enter. The gate was open, though, the sign was swung to the side and I made an executive decision keep to on keeping on. Into half-a-dozen men in combat dress, gesturing at me with M16 rifles.

Despite the reputation they had in Vietnam, M16’s actually do work, and I eased to the curb and put my hands on the steering wheel where they could see for themselves that, whatever weapons I might have concealed in the Land Rover, I wasn’t brandishing them.

“Sir,” one of the guards said through the window. “Do you speak English?”

In America, nobody would have asked that. You don’t need to share a common language to throw somebody to the ground, put guns to his head and lace him up with plastic ties.

“Yes, Sir,” I said. Batswana are formal about their greetings, and this seemed like a very good time to be as polite as I could manage. “It is my mother tongue.”

“And you know how to read?”

“Yes, Sir. I do.” This is a good time, I thought, not to pretend to be an unlicensed driver. Literacy was part of the test to get a Botswana driver’s license. You have to be able to read the application in order to fill it out.

“And you saw the sign telling you not to drive into here?”

“Yes, Sir. I did.”

“Then we would appreciate it if you would please turn around and leave through the front gate.” After that, he told me how to get to where I’d been trying to get to in the first place.

In America, helping me get to where I’d been trying to get to would not have been his top concern. Or mine. In America, if you so much as land a model airplane on the White House lawn, you’d better have your affairs in order because nobody is going to see you again for a long time. In the Land fo the Free, the government will disappear you right off the streets of Portland, Oregon, if your fingerprints vaguely resemble those found on a paper bag when a commuter train gets blown up in Madrid. Across the border in Zimbabwe you can get disappeared right off the planet for wearing camo clothing. In Botswana, I showed up uninvited inside the fence around the President’s house in a Land Rover that could carry a good ton of high explosives, and they just politely told me how to get to where I wanted to go.

At the film festival, former President Masire spent more time than you’d think chatting and joking with Peggy and me, which is something else that wouldn’t happen with an ex-president in America. Then he spotted somebody down front and, looking like a lanky, black cowboy, stood up and stepped across six or eight rows of seats to greet a man he hadn’t seen in years. Quett Masire was in his mid-Eighties at the time.

Then he came back and took his seat and the film started. On screen, he talked quietly about his presidency, how he’d won it, his hopes for his country and his people. Behind him, cows mooed quietly.

Next, there was a movie about one of his political enemies. A man who’d studied in China during the time of the Great Helmsman and returned filled with Maoist zeal to lead Botswana through its own Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. He hadn’t had a chance at the polls. Partly because he was up against Seretse Khama and Quett Masire. But, also, because socialism didn’t have anything to do with Botswana. “We need to find our own way, not follow some alien path,” Masire and Khama had said. But, mostly, because they said it all over the country. At a time when it took a week to get to the other side of the Kgalagadi, those two went to every village in British Bechuanaland and introduced themselves, personally, to almost every citizen. The good Socialist candidates, the men of the people, didn’t bother with people. They just travelled back and forth on the single railroad up the east side of the country left over from when Cecil Rhodes wanted to sneak an army around behind the Boers in the Transvaal.

The early days were old times, now, and Masire grinned and shook hands with the Chinese-backed candidate. And the Soviet-backed candidate, and had good words about them and they grinned and shook hands with him, and had good words about him, too. By then, they were all founding fathers.

It made me regret they didn’t have documentary film crews during the time of our third president. Washington would have been dead, just as Sir Seretse Khama was dead. But John Adams would have been alive and Peggy and I might have sat next to him. And Jefferson would have told his own story. And Paine, and Light Horse Harry Lee, and Hamilton, and Aaron Burr. I’d love to hear what those boys had to say for themselves.

There was another thing the moderator was careful to point out. Nobody had to go through a metal detector to get into the building. There weren’t any guys with machineguns standing outside, not a single guard with a bazooka or helicopters orbiting overhead. It was just a roomful of people who cared about their country reminiscing about what things had been like when the country was young. And they’d been young, too.

Try sliding into a seat in a high-school auditorium in America and discovering you’re sitting next to one of our former presidents. You couldn’t get within a hundred yards of the place. That’s something else I regret about America.