This chapter examines the appointment of foreign judges through the lens of political contestation and potential judicial interference in Botswana, Lesotho and Eswatini. It first interrogates why the appointment of foreign judges continued after domestic pipelines of judges had increased. Adopting a regime-based approach, the chapter first argues that the continued appointment of foreign judges beyond functional necessity is a form of strategic policy drift, because it does not require a new policy and it may be couched in positive or populist terms. Second, this chapter examines the timing of the pivot away from the appointment of foreign judges in Botswana and Eswatini. It shows that judicial leadership combined with local demand plays an important role in the timing of change, but that the localisation of appointments to apex courts of appeal, without reform of the appointment process itself, provides democratic window dressing for hegemonic regimes. The rhetoric around citizen-based localisation (Botswana) or racially-based Africanisation (Eswatini) has a populist flavour which may provide cover for varying degrees of autocratic behaviours.

This chapter maps the history of efforts of Black Consciousness activists to rebuild their shattered armed wing post-1976. It advances the story in exile through a careful look at attempts at Black Consciousness organizing to restart their armed struggle. This tenaciousness, ever-present in the Azanian Black Nationalist Tradition, highlights the continued importance and relevance of Black Consciousness to the eventual fall of apartheid post-1977. They continued to fight up until 1993 despite the ANC actively obstructing and preventing state or NGO support from being given to organizations under the Black Consciousness banner. These newer formations (IRE, SAYRCO and AZANLA) would engage closely with the wider Third World Revolution and find ways to adopt different lessons, tactics, strategies, theories and perspectives into their ever-expanding political praxis. This did not lessen or dilute their Black Consciousness praxis; on the contrary, it complimented its theoretical and organizational capacities. Nevertheless, the lack of state support, unevenness in centring the gender question, the continued strength of the apartheid war machine and serious disagreements among different Black Consciousness factions hurt the movement in exile. Regardless, they continued to fight.

This chapter details the first attempt of the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) to put together an armed wing in exile in Botswana. After engaging with the different movements in exile Mafuna, Matshoba, Mafole and Nengwekhulu had to figure out how their Black Consciousness praxis would fit in this new phase of struggle. Based out of Botswana, they were able to maintain close communications with the internal wing of the movement that was growing rapidly. They had to use the skills they learned building BCM inside the country in exile to keep their work discreet, yet, continue to organize in plain sight. Eventually, they were able to receive help from the PAC and North African/Middle Eastern radicals in their quest for military training. This represented a continuation of the Azanian Black Nationalist Tradition in Botswana and showed Black Consciousness had the ability to learn from and absorb tactics, strategies and theories from wider Third-World struggles. Critically, the movement would have to encounter patriarchy and sexism as it pertained to who could even obtain military training. Marginalizing the gender question weakened the formation and demeaned the labour, triumphs and sacrifices of Black women who had with the men made their work possible.

In Chapter 7 I move onto the case study of Botswana, which in contrast to Somalia and Uganda has experienced structural transformation due in large part to its diamond industry. Industrialization in Botswana has led to a sectoral shift out of agriculture as workers have left rural areas to move to cities and join the modern workforce, thereby leading to a decline in the relative value of rural land. I employ both qualitative and quantitative evidence to show that ethnic fractionalization has declined in Botswana since the mid-twentieth-century and examine parliamentary debates around ethnic identity. Moreover, I show that this shift has happened not because of but largely despite efforts of the Botswanan state, which has both discouraged rural-urban migration and failed to alleviate institutional ethnic inequalities that persist to the present day. Finally, I consider alternative explanations for ethnic homogenization in Botswana and find them all wanting.

Countries in Southern Africa face many social, development, economic, trade, education, health, diplomatic, defense, security, and political challenges. These countries also have a history of colonialism, liberatory struggle, and independence. Although the language of business and schooling is English for most of the countries, there are still huge chunks of the population that are illiterate and functionally illiterate. People also speak one or more indigenous languages. The majority of the countries in this region have high levels of unemployment and poverty. Ensuring that psychological assessments are appropriate and fair in these contexts is a huge challenge. When this challenge occurs in a poorly resourced setting against the background of social inequality, practitioners need to be highly resourceful, as well as culturally sensitive and ethically aware. This chapter discusses the historical development of psychological assessment in South Africa, Zambia, Botswana, and Zimbabwe demonstrating how the social and contextual factors interacted with assessment.

Part V explores how Batswana manage interdependencies and distinctions between kinship and politics on local, national, and transnational levels. It takes in three major events: in Chapter 13, a family party; in Chapter 14, a homecoming celebration for the first age regiment to be initiated in a generation; and in Chapter 15, an opening event held by a respected national NGO. Chapter 13 argues that family celebrations are catalysts for conflict, performing familial success and distinguishing home from village by demonstrating an ability to manage dikgang. In Chapter 14, families prove pivotal to regenerating the morafe (tribal polity), and initiation proves pivotal in re-embedding Tswana law in families – equipping them to better engage dikgang. NGO, government, and donor performances of success also rely on the performance of kinship; in Chapter 15’s opening ceremony, idioms and ideals of kinship legitimise the work of government and civil society agencies, establishing their precedence over the families they serve. But their everyday work is also permeated – even generated – by unmarked, conflicting kinship dynamics. In their interventions, these agencies unsettle both the interdependencies and distinctions Batswana customarily make between kinship and politics; and, in doing so, they may create more profound challenges than the AIDS epidemic.

Tsholo filled me in as we bumped our way along a meandering red dirt road to the outskirts of the village in her NGO’s spacious, logo-plastered combi-van. ‘The girl’s parents died,’ she began.

Dijo ga di ratanelwe.

This week, Batswana have welcomed into their family twenty-nine ambassadors from Canada. In diplomatic work, relations can be nurtured at personal level; nation-states are composed of individuals, and the international system is composed of nation-states, so it follows that individual relations facilitate better international relations.

Part I maps out the geographies of Tswana kinship, beginning in Chapter 1 with the Tswana gae, or home. The gae is a multiple, scattered place – stretching to include masimo (farmlands) and moraka (cattle post) – integrated by continuous movement, shifting residence, and care work that gravitates around the lelwapa (courtyard). For kin, both closeness and distance create dikgang; and while continuous movement enables balances to be struck, ‘going up and down’ produces tensions and dangers of its own. In Chapter 2, the building of new houses – a critical means of go itirela, or making-for-oneself – presents similar conundrums, requiring the mobilisation of resources among family in order to establish distance from them. When help is refused, dikgang generated are enough to stall building and self-making alike. These risks are marked in an epidemic era, where orphaned children may inherit early, and where NGO and government programmes may provide access to resources they might not otherwise have. Chapter 3 describes the spatial practices of these NGO and social work programmes, which show surprising similarities to the spatial practices of family – but also invert those spatialities and knock them out of sync, producing problematic alternatives to the gae, and new, intractable dikgang.

Ngwana e o sa leleng o swela tharing.

Pono came struggling up the dusty road towards me, pushing a wobbling wheelbarrow piled high with sacks of maize meal, sugar, vegetables, and odd toiletries tucked in around the edges. I hollered to catch her attention, and she looked up, throwing me a cheeky grin. Shortly, she pulled up in front of me to rest. ‘I’m from the shop,’ she said breathlessly, omitting the other obvious detail: she had been sent to take her food basket.

Bogwe gabobole. Relationship-in-law does not decay.

Part III explores the unique dikgang of reproducing kinship in a time of AIDS, specifically in pregnancy and marriage. Chapters 7 and 8 contend that, for the Tswana, intimate relationships become kin relationships through a gradual and carefully managed process of recognition, whereby they become visible, speakable, and known. Recognition is marked and achieved by dikgang – the collective reflection upon and negotiation of which involve wider and wider circles of kin. These dikgang are beset by the legacies of previously unresolved dikgang that echo across generations, making them especially fraught. Accumulating and successfully navigating these dikgang are key to self-making – in pregnancy for women, and in marriage for men. Chapter 9 argues that thinking of HIV and AIDS strictly in terms of risk overlooks the extent to which intimate relationships are ordinarily beset by risk; and it ignores the critical ways in which the management of such risks makes meaningful relationships, makes selfhood, and makes kin. If AIDS raises the stakes of such risks, it may do so more in terms of its effects on negotiating recognition rather than in terms of life and death – a possibility that goes some distance in explaining Botswana’s persistently high rates of new infection.

Part II explores the economies of care among kin. Chapter 4 explores the Tswana understanding of care as a combination of sentiment, material provision, and work that affects the physical and social well-being of others – and as a key resource in the contribution economies of kinship. But the things, work, and sentiment of care can be disarticulated and are subject to competing claims by family, partners, and friends, with implications for self-making projects. Chapter 5 examines the tensions that arise between these obligations to contribute care – especially among siblings – and the uncertainty about whether people will contribute what they ought, to whom, and for how long, which make contributions of care a volatile source of dikgang. Care, in these terms, is perpetually subject to crisis; the dominant public health frameworks that cast AIDS as a ‘crisis of care’ overlook the ways in which the Tswana family routinely faces, copes with, and even regenerates itself through such crises. Chapter 6 concludes with a consideration of how NGO and government interventions aim to provide care in the form of food baskets and feeding programmes – but dissociate these from specific people and relationships, inadvertently creating new crises by doing so.

Phokoje wa morago dintsa diammona.

Dilo makwati di kwatabolotswa mo go ba bangwe.