First impressions of Gaborone

Nearly four weeks into my stay in Botswana, I’m starting to feel like I’ve found my footing and am really getting settled. Unfamiliar pronunciations are starting to roll a bit more easily off the tongue, seemingly-identical intersections are becoming landmarks that help me build my mental map of Gaborone.

Work has been somewhat slow, but I am looking for projects to get involved in. When I’m not working, I’ve been filling my time with braais (barbeques), slowly improving my disastrous frisbee “skills”, camping, cooking and being cooked for—including a glorious eggs benedict breakfast and a Shabbat dinner, finding my way around the combi system, wine tasting at the aspirationally-named “yacht club”, reading, running, learning new boardgames, and, mostly, meeting a lot of fantastic people.

Just outside Gaborone

Botswana is dry. And, because it’s winter, surprisingly cold in the pale mornings. “Just wait ‘til the summer comes,” says every Motswana and long-term expat I’ve met. The sky stretches out blue and blue and blue without even the faintest thought of a cloud, and even the two days so far that have been overcast yielded no moisture. Gaborone is more of a sprawling town than a city, but it’s the largest in the country, so I’ll leave the condescending New Yorker behind for now. The deep pink light of sunset slanting through air thick with dust, the quietly imposing backdrop of Kgale hill rising at the southern edge of the city: these are moments of striking beauty that will stay with me. Botswana is often considered an African “miracle”—a stable, middle-income country with strong government investment in infrastructure, social services and population health. Indeed, I have to say I’ve been impressed.

I’m lucky to be living in a nice apartment provided by the clinic—primarily for American medical residents here to do month-long rotations at the clinic—in a neighborhood surrounded by embassies. So I know I can’t assume my experiences of reliable internet, electricity and running water are at all universal. A quick look at Old Naledi (a high-density, low-income neighborhood that was historically an illegal settlement) and villages just outside of Gaborone, neighborhoods that many of my teenagers call home, certainly makes that obvious.

Nevertheless, I’ve been impressed with the immaculately paved main roads, the relatively easy public transportation, the general quality of building construction, and the potable tap water, and I don’t think my impressions here are too overly biased by my living situation. Even an article critical of Gaborone’s planning, land allocation and development calls the city “extraordinary in African terms… a city lacking in mass poverty, extensive squatter settlements or recurrent civil strife: for all appearances, an orderly, affluent urban area.”

It seems to me that one of the most crucial differences between Accra and Gaborone is population density (about 9,600/km² and 1,500/km², respectively). I notice it in the different textures of daily life, the feel of the city as you walk down the street. Density is more concrete than just noise and bustle: it’s also the traffic that makes everything run late, the restaurants and small-scale businesses that can pop up and slowly grow in unexpected places, and (arguably) greater overlap of rich and poor. And, importantly, it’s the additional wear on infrastructure, including roads, water delivery and electricity grids. Brian Larkin points out that such “material structures produce immaterial forms of urbanism—the senses of excitement, danger, or stimulation that suffuse different spaces in the city and create the experience of what urbanism is.” I can think of numerous similarities between Gaborone and Accra, but ultimately the forms of urbanism in these cities are drastically different.

The simpler explanation for the differing material structures is that Botswana’s GDP per capita is over five times that of Ghana. But I suspect that Gaborone’s public services and infrastructure seem impressive because they endure less wear, and that the cloistering of low-income populations makes it that much easier to extol the prosperity of the rest of the city. These are density-related issues more than financial ones. It will be interesting to see if density rises significantly as the economy further develops and mortality declines (particularly HIV-related mortality), or if the city will rather sprawl.

Jane Jacobs (1961) writes that cities, and creativity and innovation within urban centers, flourish when there is sufficient density for street-level interactions between a diverse array of people. She would certainly prefer Accra to Gaborone, which was designed according to exactly the principles she most opposed. She would also, I think, prefer Old Naledi to Gaborone’s other, more sterile neighborhoods, much as I preferred Kariakoo to Sea Cliff Village in Dar es Salaam.

I imagine a future Gaborone with the same sparsely-populated center and ever more densely-packed neighborhoods around the periphery. Would those densely populated neighborhoods be pockets of collaborative innovation, or would the structural problems of poverty underlying the need for such close quarters staunch such creative vibrancy? A call for better education, health services, and investment in these neighborhoods….

Now that I’ve found my footing, I hope to venture further out of my privileged arena. I’m sure my thoughts on Gaborone’s neighborhoods, infrastructure and urbanism will develop—and probably change completely—as I get to know the city better and from different perspectives.

On a side note, as I try to understand Botswana a little better, I can’t help but think about the country’s colonial experiences and process of decolonization. I have much to learn on this front, and stand to be corrected by those who know more of Botswana’s history, but at the very least I gather that the nationalist movement developed later than in other countries, during a time when colonial powers were under pressure to release their colonies. In Ghana, narratives of the country’s—and particularly Kwame Nkrumah’s—struggles against colonialism are part of the fabric of Ghanaian national identity, but I’ve yet to encounter that here. So I often wonder how different experiences of and attitudes towards decolonization have influenced different countries’ development and policies. (I know there are many, many books on this topic – recommendations welcome.)

The British use of infrastructure was not about simply staging the representation of rule; it was about addressing and producing a particular sort of modern colonial subject. Technologically adept, forward thinking, mutable, this subject was formed by the criss-crossing of new communication networks. Railways, roads, and radio broadcasts were erected to bring into being a technologically mediated subject proud of his past but exposed to new ideas, open to the education, knowledge, and ideas traveling along this new architecture of communication… In a sense, it is this imagined subject that is immanent in the building of new infrastructures, the fantasy to which those structures are addressed. It was a subject position with which many Nigerians were uncomfortable, while others saw it as an object of desire.  (Larkin 2009)

Given Botswana’s decolonial path, I wondered as I read this passage, is it possible that Botswana and its ruling elite had, perhaps, been more closely aligned with the “modernizing” aims of the British and, as a result, chosen to invest further, rather than resisting the reminder of colonialism? In Nigeria, Larkin writes that the identification of infrastructure and technology with the British caused new technologies to “[enter] into a highly contested social field in which electronic technologies were associated explicitly with Christianity and with colonial rule.” I don’t mean to claim that Botswana has good infrastructure because it has a less antagonistic relationship with their former colonial ruler—there are many problems with that claim. I just wonder if there might have been somewhat less ambivalence towards modernism at the end of Botswana’s colonial era, and if this might have influenced policy decisions in ways that affect contemporary policy… although obviously there are many other factors at play as well.

Add this to my list of things to research further! Please feel free to send reading recommendations related to these questions.