Botswana
I've answered a few questions on here about the economic development of Japan, or Switzerland, Germany post WWII. But I've yet to see one about sub-Saharan Africa's post-WWII economic success story: Botswana.
When Botswana obtained its independence from the British in 1965, its GDP per capita was only US$497.2 (in US 2010 prices), but by 2000 it was $5,210, and in the latest World Bank figures for 2018 it was $8,031 per capita - and about US$16,500 in purchasing power parity terms (PPP). While Botswana has notoriously high inequality, the poverty rate has fallen too. In 1985, an estimated 43% of the population was living on less than $1.90 a day (2011 PPP), and 82% on less than $5.50, in 2017 that had fallen to 16% and 60% respectively. Life expectancy at birth has risen from 51.5 years to 69.3 years by 2018.
This is all the more impressive given that Botswana is a landlocked country. Botswana does have considerable diamond resources, which account for some 80% of exports, but there's a long record of countries with natural resource abundance that are direly poor. There's evidence that natural resources can lead to bad governance, in resource-poor countries the governing elite's income is much more linked to how much the broad economy is earning, so they have an incentive to build inclusive organisations, in resouce-rich ones the government can just extract taxes from the resources. What's more, the existence of extensive natural resources can cause massive civil wars or intense infighting amongst the elite as they seek to control the revenues from the natural resources. So why did Botswana do so well?
D Acemoglu, S Johnson, JA Robinson argued in a 2002 paper that what made Botswana's economic outcome so good, relative to other African countries, was institutional quality. To quote:
Our conjecture is that Botswana's institutions reflect a combination of factors. These include tribal institutions that encouraged broad based participation and constraints on political leaders during the pre-colonial period; only limited effect of British colonization on these pre-colonial institutions because of the peripheral nature of Botswana to the British Empire; the fact that upon independence, the most important rural interests, chiefs and cattle owners, were politically powerful; the income from diamonds, which generated enough rents for the main political actors that it increased the opportunity cost of further rent seeking; and finally, a number of important and farsighted decisions by the post-independence political leaders, in particular Seretse Khama and Quett Masire.
Seretse Khama was a Botswanan and a hereditary chief, who studied in Britain in the 1940s (his uncle acted as a regent). He married a white Englishwoman, Ruth Williams. This marriage caused outrage in the South African government, which led to the British banning him from returning to Botswana (then a Protectorate) to take up his chieftainship, until he renouced said chieftainship in 1956. This didn't stop his poliical activity, and in 1960 Seretse Khama and others founded the Bechuanaland Democratic Party (later the Botswana Democratic Party, BDP). Seretse Khama's background meant that he could attact the support of both traditional rural chiefs (and, given rural structures, loyal commoners), and the growing educational elites of teachers and civil servants. The BDP did win every election from 1965 onwards, but there's no evidence of electoral fraud.
Interestingly, despite his background, Seretse Khama appears to have deliberately taken steps to limit the power of the chiefs, including the Chieftancy Act of 1965 and the Chieftancy Amendment Act of 1970, that gave the President the ability to remove a chief. He also moved ownership of sub-soil mineral rights from the traditional tribes whose land these were found in, to the national government, despite the main diamond mines being under his own tribe's lands.
Quett Masire was minister for finance (from 1966) and development planning (from 1967), and Vice-President, under Seretse Khama, then President once Seretse Khama died in July 1980, until 1998. Quett Masire was born a commoner, but distinguished himself academically, and, through the 1950s, as a school headmaster, an agriculturalist and a journalist (one of those all-round competent people). In 1961 he helped found the BDP, and became the first Vice-President, in 1966. Botswana was very well managed financially, the government budget was in surplus from the mid-1970s and diamond rents were invested rather than disappearing in corruption or consumption. Arguably a partial cause of this was a deliberate decision by the BDP at independence to keep foreign civil servants in their positions and only slowly replace them with Botswanan graduates as capacity was built up, rather than the rapid localisation used in many other African countries (for understandable reasons). Some corruption has occurred, but Botswana's public service is relatively uncorrupt, the country rates as 34th in the world in Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index.
Botswana's policies are far from perfect, the World Bank notes that it is one of the most unequal countries in the world, by Gini index, and has the world's second highest rate of HIV infection - a reason why life expenctancy is not higher. The World Bank also has concerns about the quality of education and healthcare, despite significant levels of government investment in this area, and the unemployment rate has been persistently high. It faces future diversification issues in its economy as diamond revenues decline.
However, overall, Botswana is an important success story from the Global South.
Sources
D Acemoglu, S Johnson, JA Robinson, 2002, An african success story: Botswana, MIT, Department of Economics, Working Paper 01-37 https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/63256/africansuccessst00acem.pdf
Sebudubudu, David, 2020, The Institutional Framework of the Developmental State in Botswana https://www.researchgate.net/profile/David_Sebudubudu/publication/265451098_The_Institutional_Framework_of_the_Developmental_State_in_Botswana/links/5530bbf30cf2f2a588ab2a03.pdf
The World Bank In Botswana: Overview, https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/botswana/overview
I’m actually just putting the finishing touches on a paper about how the United States’ removal of Bikini Atoll’s people (during the opening years of the Cold War, so that the US could test nuclear weapons on Bikini) affected their culture!
To put it extremely briefly, Bikinian culture was tied to land. Their deities, methods of social organization, and day-to-day survival all came from and depended on their islands. When the US took Bikini, they lost their direct connection to it, and so their way of life has been permanently altered.
I’d like to share more, but I’ve got to go to work now. I’ll add some books and articles on the subject later today. I’d also be happy to try and answer questions if anyone’s curious!
EDIT: Please forgive how late this is!
Reading Material:
Dibblin, Jane. Day of Two Suns: US Nuclear Testing and the Pacific Islanders. New York: New Amsterdam Books, 1988.
Guyer, Ruth Levy. “Radioactivity and Rights: Clashes at Bikini Atoll.” American Journal of Public Health 91, no. 9 (2001): 1371-1376. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1446783/.
Niedenthal, Jack. “A History of the People of Bikini Following Nuclear Weapons Testing in the Marshall Islands: With Recollections and Views of Elders of Bikini Atoll.” Health Physics 73, no. 1 (1997): 28-36. https://www.bikiniatoll.com/Health%20Physics%20paper%20JMN.pdf.
Niedenthal, Jack. For the Good of Mankind: A History of the People of Bikini and their Islands. Majuro, Marshall Islands: Bravo Publishers, 2001.
Also, an interesting website run by Mr. Niedenthal: https://www.bikiniatoll.com/
Welcome to the ninth installment of ‘History Upside Down’, our Spring 2020 Floating Feature and Flair Drive Series. This series it intended to shine a light on people often left out of the ‘standard’ histories, and give voice to the subalterns of history.
Today’s theme is Global Southern Histories, and we welcome anyone and everyone to share histories that fit the theme. Stories of triumph or tragedy, or cheerful or sad, all are welcome.
Floating Features are intended to allow users to contribute their own original work. If you are interested in reading recommendations, please consult our booklist, or else limit them to follow-up questions to posted content. Similarly, please do not post top-level questions. This is not an AMA with panelists standing by to respond. Such questions ought to be submitted as normal questions in the subreddit.
As is the case with previous Floating Features, there is relaxed moderation here to allow more scope for speculation and general chat than there would be in a usual thread! But with that in mind, we of course expect that anyone who wishes to contribute will do so politely and in good faith.
Coming up next in the series is The Gender Histories Floating Feature on May 16th. Make sure to mark it on your calendar!