Дарон Аджемоглу - Why Nations Fail

Each of the three chiefs, Khama, Sebele and Bathoen, shall have a country within which they shall live as hitherto under the protection of the Queen. The Queen shall appoint an officer to reside with them. The chiefs will rule their own people much as at present.

Rhodes’s reaction to being outmaneuvered by the three African chiefs was predictable. He cabled to one of his employees, saying, “I do object to being beaten by three canting natives.”

The chiefs in fact had something valuable that they had protected from Rhodes and would subsequently protect from British indirect rule. By the nineteenth century, the Tswana states had developed a core set of political institutions. These involved both an unusual degree, by sub-Saharan African standards, of political centralization and collective decision-making procedures that can even be viewed as a nascent, primitive form of pluralism. Just as the Magna Carta enabled the participation of barons into the political decision-making process and put some restrictions on the actions of the English monarchs, the political institutions of the Tswana, in particular the kgotla , also encouraged political participation and constrained chiefs. The South African anthropologist Isaac Schapera describes how the kgotla worked as follows:

all matters of tribal policy are dealt with finally before a general assembly of the adult males in the chief’s kgotla (council place). Such meetings are very frequently held … among the topics discussed … are tribal disputes, quarrels between the chief and his relatives, the imposition of new levies, the undertaking of new public works, the promulgation of new decrees by the chief … it is not unknown for the tribal assembly to overrule the wishes of the chief. Since anyone may speak, these meetings enable him to ascertain the feelings of the people generally, and provide the latter with an opportunity of stating their grievances. If the occasion calls for it, he and his advisers may be taken severely to task, for the people are seldom afraid to speak openly and frankly.

Beyond the kgotla , the Tswana chieftaincy was not strictly hereditary but open to any man demonstrating significant talent and ability. Anthropologist John Comaroff studied in detail the political history of another of the Tswana states, the Rolong. He showed that though in appearance the Tswana had clear rules stipulating how the chieftancy was to be inherited, in practice these rules were interpreted to remove bad rulers and allow talented candidates to become chief. He showed that winning the chieftancy was a matter of achievement, but was then rationalized so that the successful competitor appeared to be the rightful heir. The Tswana captured this idea with a proverb, with a tinge of constitutional monarchy: kgosi ke kgosi ka morafe , “The king is king by the grace of the people.”

The Tswana chiefs continued in their attempts to maintain their independence from Britain and preserve their indigenous institutions after their trip to London. They conceded the construction of railways in Bechuanaland, but limited the intervention of the British in other aspects of economic and political life. They were not opposed to the construction of the railways, certainly not for the same reasons as the Austro-Hungarian and Russian monarchs blocked railways. They just realized that railways, like the rest of the policies of the British, would not bring development to Bechuanaland as long as it was under colonial control. The early experience of Quett Masire, president of independent Botswana from 1980 to 1998, explains why. Masire was an enterprising farmer in the 1950s; he developed new cultivation techniques for sorghum and found a potential customer in Vryburg Milling, a company located across the border in South Africa. He went to the railway station master at Lobatse in Bechuanaland and asked to rent two rail trucks to move his crop to Vryburg. The station master refused. Then he got a white friend to intervene. The station master reluctantly agreed, but quoted Masire four times the rate for whites. Masire gave up and concluded, “It was the practice of the whites, not just the laws prohibiting Africans from owning freehold land or holding trading licenses that kept blacks from developing enterprises in Bechuanaland.”

All in all, the chiefs, and the Tswana people, had been lucky. Perhaps against all odds, they succeeded in preventing Rhodes’s takeover. As Bechuanaland was still marginal for the British, the establishment of indirect rule there did not create the type of vicious circle playing out in Sierra Leone (this page–this page). They also avoided the kind of colonial expansion that went on in the interior of South Africa that would turn those lands into reservoirs of cheap labor for white miners or farmers. The early stages of the process of colonization are a critical juncture for most societies, a crucial period during which events that will have important long-term consequences for their economic and political development transpire. As we discussed in chapter 9, most societies in sub-Saharan Africa, just as those in South America and South Asia, witnessed the establishment or intensification of extractive institutions during colonization. The Tswana would instead avoid both intense indirect rule and the far worse fate that would have befallen them had Rhodes succeeded in annexing their lands. This was not just blind luck, however. It was once again a result of the interplay between the existing institutions, shaped by the institutional drift of the Tswana people, and the critical juncture brought about by colonialism. The three chiefs had made their own luck by taking the initiative and traveling to London, and they were able to do this because they had an unusual degree of authority, compared with other tribal leaders in sub-Saharan Africa, owing to the political centralization the Tswana tribes had achieved, and perhaps they also had an unusual degree of legitimacy, because of the modicum of pluralism embedded in their tribal institutions.

Another critical juncture at the end of the colonial period would be more central to the success of Botswana, enabling it to develop inclusive institutions. By the time Bechuanaland became independent in 1966 under the name Botswana, the lucky success of chiefs Sebele, Bathoen, and Khama was long in the past. In the intervening years, the British invested little in Bechuanaland. At independence, Botswana was one of the poorest countries in the world; it had a total of twelve kilometers of paved roads, twenty-two citizens who had graduated from university, and one hundred from secondary school. To top it all off, it was almost completely surrounded by the white regimes of South Africa, Namibia, and Rhodesia, all of which were hostile to independent African countries run by blacks. It would have been on few people’s list of countries most likely to succeed. Yet over the next forty-five years, Botswana would become one of the fastest-growing countries in the world. Today Botswana has the highest per capita income in sub-Saharan Africa, and is at the same level as successful Eastern European countries such as Estonia and Hungary, and the most successful Latin American nations, such as Costa Rica.

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.