allAfrica.com: Botswana: Brace Up for 'Royal Military Dictatorship' (Page 1 of 3)

Pamphlet No 1 is the most important political work of post independent Botswana. It made Kenneth Koma the most important political personality after Seretse Khama.

Koma's pamphlet was utilitarian academic work that offered an assessment of the condition of the Bechuanaland Protectorate at the time it was written.

At the same time it laid out a philosophy, programme, and mode of organisation that could help Batswana to move forward from virtual submission to neo-colonialism to the embrace of the opportunities that a decolonised southern Africa had to offer.

It had been adopted as the 'guiding' document of the Botswana National Front. In practice, it was much more than a guiding document. It was a statement of an alternative ideology to that which was offered by the mainstream anti-colonial political movements of the day, among them the Botswana Peoples Party, the Botswana Democratic Party and the Botswana Independence Party.

Pamphlet No 1, even as it did not outwardly announce itself as such, was clearly a socialist document.

Its author would have been a Bolshevik, as opposed to the Mensheviks, who reneged on the social democratic programme that fought Tsarist Russia in order to contemplate a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

He would have been a Trotskyite in the later years when Stalin sought to corrupt the gains made in the 'October 17' socialist revolution. And he would have been a Maoist in the era when the Soviets sought to appropriate ownership of the socialist revolution that would also assist the movement for independence in the colonised African countries.

He arrived in the Bechuanaland Protectorate, a socialist, even if he might have espoused a variety of tendencies among the Marxist revolutionaries of his time in South Africa, Eastern Europe and Africa.

He understood, and attempted on his arrival on the political stage immediately after 'independence' to seek a Botswana united front that would be anti-imperialist, also standing opposed to backward feudalism of the type that Botswana typified in the run up to nominal independence of 1966.

As it turned out, the independence movement of Botswana did not arrive at any systematic discussion of the nature of 'imperialism' or 'feudalism' as they manifested themselves in Botswana, but it quickly rushed to the more immediate practical goal of receiving independence from a tired colonial Britain, which had suffered fatal bruises from the African anti colonial movement of the late 1950's.

And so, 'anti -imperialism and anti feudalism' all appeared as one under the banner of 'anti-colonialism'.

In that fashion, the Botswana Democratic Party was to succeed in wearing the cloak of the 'nationalists' who agitated for 'independence', even if they did so in the furtherance of the continued allegiance to the Queen. The BPP and BIP fought and were unable to take advantage of their early start in agitating for decolonisation, leaving the BDP to gallop to British sponsored electoral victory in 1965 and 1966.

The BPP, under Phillip Matante was suspicious of Koma's perceived inclinations towards soviet socialism, even as his party received assistance from Kwame Nkrumah, himself a 'communist', an author and political organiser of impeccable credentials.

Lenyeletse Koma believes that Mpho was friendlier to socialist ideology because of his experience at the African National Congress of South Africa, which allied itself to, among others, the South African Communist Party.

It is a mistaken view, but nevertheless, not the subject of discussion in this contribution to an assessment of the state of the opposition as Botswana receives Ian Khama in Festus Mogae's place.

Because the 'united front', presumably embracing all 'patriotic forces' including the BPP and the BPP, the Botswana National Front was founded.

It was of Botswana. It grew to be national. But never was it at 'Front' in the sense that Koma, or the global liberation movement would have wanted.

Its only claim to being a 'front' was that it had a 'women's wing' and a 'youth wing', all of which were features of any conventional mass party such as the BDP or the BPP.

It might be credibly argued that then, the BPP enjoyed greater support among the working class among the workers in commercial centres of Lobatse and Francistown, the Botswana Meat Commission, Tati Concessions and Rhodesia Railways, in the early days of independence; support which the 'front' perceived as only incidental to its quest for the achievement of its 'minimum programme' as envisaged in Pamphlet No 1.

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