allAfrica.com: Botswana: Book Review - In Search of Money, and Blessings for Botswana (Page 1 of 2)

Pula, Pula, Pula: Two years in search of money, rain and blessings for Botswana is a new memoir from a personal vanity press "Wild Dog Publishing" (in the book no address is provided for this entity - it is also confusing as there already is a Wild Dog Press in Johannesburg). If you know people who are visiting Botswana and who are looking for something to read on the plane or while on safari, this might be a reasonable choice. It is written more for people outside Botswana and in the United Kingdom (UK) than for Batswana. It might be a helpful introduction for those programmes placing volunteers here, as long as its limitations are recognised.

Alan Pattison, husband of Robyn Cox, proposed that they go to work in Africa (again).

They had been here for two years in the early 1990s, but mainly in South Africa. Since then they had become successful professionals. Robyn had skills of "private sector marketing" and had worked to "Improve communication within schools". Alan wanted to use their skills "to help improve the life of Africans ... definitely not a role that takes locals' jobs". They rejected working with agencies such as Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) because they feared a placement where they would end up "counting warthogs" (they assumed VSO was for youth and did not know it took mature volunteers with skills to offer). Alan had discovered Skillshare International and was offered a position for two years as "Fund-raising Coordinator for a children's HIV treatment centre in Gaborone". This was with the Botswana-Baylor Children's Clinical Centre for Excellence.

Cox could not have ended up with VSO in Botswana as they pulled out years ago. She is frank in admitting she really wanted to go to Tanzania.

Though they had spent two years in Johannesburg, they knew very little about Botswana. "It was part of the world we knew, or thought we did. We ideally wanted to get to know a different part of Africa." They worried that "Botswana might be too South African". How they could even think this is not clear, as they had previously visited the Okavango Delta.

Pula, Pula, Pula as a volume is a bit egotistical and ethnocentric. It reads more like a series of notes from her diaries for different stages over their two years in Botswana or personal blogs that were assembled and posted to their friends and family at home. It is chatty, intimate and superficially informed. Work and recreation are merged and tossed about. The book would have benefited from knowledgeable editing. Some of the humour is even unintended, like Kgale Hill wearing a "mask". I am not sure how people in Skillshare International will react to the long section that discusses in close detail the dynamics of a retreat at Otse, which is both damming and with hindsight hilarious. Let us hope they are able to laugh too.

One problem is that Cox tended to accept first and simplistic explanations for things. For example, Southern African organisations become "South African". And that "local people with the right skills are not willing to work in NGOs if they can work in glamorous private sector roles". Underneath the dynamics of salary scales issues like job security and progression are ignored. Often public sector positions are also more attractive than working for NGOs that have difficulty in paying the prevailing or equivalent salaries. To the outsider everything beyond Gaborone becomes a village, as there is no distinction (as in the census between the population of a place and its label). Even Maun is still called a "village".

There is a degree of arrogance in the statement, "We had gone to Botswana to help Africa". With 56 countries in Africa one wonders what this really, means? Fortunately Cox is too intelligent and interesting a person to have become stuck in her initial delusions.

They are typical of many short-term volunteers from other countries and as a memoir of service in Africa not exceptional.

About Botswana she says she is "not qualified to judge", but she is confident enough to write a book that is replete with judgements. Throughout this memoir, there is a steady flow of descriptions and analysis of what she has learnt that day, week or on a trip or from an interview. The major problem with most them, though they are usually thoughtful and readable, they tend often tend to rely on initial sources as final ones. They often lack the triangulation and further learning required of a good journalist who is writing about a place, its people and events. She places Botswana as an Upper-Middle Income Country according to the World Blank. Did she check the UNDP for the actually ranking of Botswana compared to other countries? Though she learned a lot from Willemien le Roux's and Alice White's "Voices of the San" she relied more on other expatriates to tell her what was going on. This book is in the references, but no other publications by le Roux and Kuru are cited. Most of the references are about the bush and how to survive in it.

They found a lot of time to get out in Botswana. Pattison even shifted to work with the Okavango Brigade in Shakawe (at a point she slips and calls it a "college").

Her account of DITSHWANELO's seminar in August 2005 is typical of her drive to provide excessive detail, trying to capture the humour in the way people cross-communicate. It includes a capsule history of Zimbabwe's problems that is far from enlightened, reflecting what she learned at the seminar, but lacking any understanding of how complex the situation really is. She enjoys making personal judgements, such as people will only attend if there is food provided, and then to say that she distanced herself from the consumption of the sandwiches.

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