Harmony – or kagiso in Setswana nationalist rhetoric – poses a problem for social scientists. So often we seek out conflict, inequality, exploitation, exclusion, protest, insurgency, resentment, and revenge. As a result, I struggled to read Catie Gressier's comparatively Panglossian At Home in the Okavango. The monograph describes the efforts of the European-descended, Botswana-born community in Maun to, in fact, belong in the surrounding Okavango region. In her telling, they mostly succeed. They speak Setswana, defer to local chiefs, and, above all, know and love the landscape, its flora, and its fauna. They almost never intermarry though. These whites feel what Gressier calls ‘experiential autochthony’, the sense of belonging – and having always belonged – on one's native soil. In this sense, Gressier narrates a story of hope: of how a white community gained acceptance in a subcontinent known for race-based violence. Scholars of whiteness in South Africa and Zimbabwe – writing so often with gloom and foreboding – would do well to take note.
Particular circumstances, however, frustrate this sort of lesson-oriented reading. Not more than five hundred Botswana-born whites live in and around Maun. At that small scale, Gressier might still have contextualized Maun as a microcosm of white-black relations in all of Botswana. But conditions differ so substantially between Maun and Gaborone as to invalidate comparison. Maun is sui generis, while Botswana itself hardly typifies southern Africa. As Gressier explains, chiefs traveled to London in 1885 to negotiate protectorate status. As Bechuanaland, the country suffered neither settlement nor pacification. Dry and inaccessible, the Kalahari and its fringes watched colonialism pass them by. Independent Botswana then began to enjoy resources and wealth – diamonds, cattle, and tourism – completely out of proportion with neighboring countries. Finally, Botswana excludes most foreigners. A xenophobic government has redirected the tide of Zimbabwean refugees towards the Limpopo and South Africa. As a rich, peaceful fortress, Botswana bears comparison with Switzerland.
Gressier hints at a pessimistic reading of these circumstances. Bushmen have experienced – and continue to experience – colonialism, dispossession, and exploitation. In 1963, the protectorate removed 1,500–2,000 people, mostly riverine Bushmen, as it established the Moremi Game Reserve. That expulsion freed up a vast territory for hunting and photo tourism. In a sense, colonial and postcolonial white and black elites have shared the spoils of an unusually cross-racial partnership in land-grabbing. If she were to make this reading more explicit, Gressier would probably have to adjust the terms of comparison with South Africa and Zimbabwe. Whites are to blacks in those countries as whites and blacks are to Bushmen in Botswana (or as whites, one might say, are to Native Americans in the United States). Gressier acknowledges the Bushmen's exclusion from national life in Botswana, and she recognizes the elitism of any ‘harmony’ among other groups. Yet, she shies away from the implications of all this: that both groups are carving up a territorial endowment depopulated through force, indeed, through explicitly racist policies on the part of the government in Gaborone.
I found Gressier to be most persuasive and informative when, in the early part of the book, she explicates the tourist trade. She drills down through feelings and rhetorics of belonging to capture subtle forms of instrumentality. Whites know and love the Okavango. They might camp and hunt there as strong, silent men and women, but they also love to share stories. Before naïve tourists, they deploy bush lore ranging from elephants to insects. They perform their experiential autonomy, indeed converting it into a valuable commodity. They romanticize everything about the safari hunt: the risk; the material deprivation (while actually on safari); and the Bushmen trackers, who for tiny wages actually find the animals to shoot. Like many southern Africans, they embrace conservation and seek to achieve or restore a balance between humans and other creatures. These whites seem to practice nature-loving without the exclusivity and arrogance so characteristic of other safari-minded people. Their self-appointed stewardship of the land still affords space for respecting the African people who inhabit it. I would gladly assign these chapters to my undergraduates (notwithstanding Gressier's fondness for the passive voice). Still, she overlooks an underside even here: the elite safari market depends entirely upon intercontinental flying – an unsustainable, climate-destroying, atmosphere-colonizing practice if ever there was one. This oversight on Gressier's part delimits the strengths and weaknesses of At Home in the Okavango. Read it as a happy village study of a place remote but caught in global processes barely detectable.
