‘Do you see those people in those cars? They don't even have houses, they have nowhere they are sleeping.’Footnote 1 So said a taxi driver, stuck in traffic on one of the main arteries through downtown Gaborone and pointing to a shiny white SUV driven by a well-dressed middle-aged woman, soon after my return to Botswana in 2014 after a fourteen-year absence. Over the next few weeks, several other people made the same comment, almost verbatim: a young man selling paintings in a downtown mall, a youth development officer at work, a university student talking to me about her life plans. Soon I started asking people about this claim (which, for its consistency, I assumed echoed something on the radio), and got vigorous and sometimes elaborate responses. I never met anyone who slept in their car, I should note, although I met carless people who were squatting with a variety of friends or relatives in the city. Taxi drivers were especially eloquent, driving battered, underpowered small sedans, on roads well populated with powerful Land Cruisers, massive Dodge Ram pickups and gleaming Mercedes, Audis and Jaguars. The youth officer said that ‘even executives, driving cars costing 800,000 pula’ (US$86,000 at the time), had no place to sleep – they lived, he said, in one-room rentals that people put up behind their more substantial houses, ‘like university students’. A university professor, when I asked him about these assertions, said that at times there were five cars behind his house (cars owned by the renters in his backyard), which was in an upscale housing development outside the city centre. He himself drove a spiffy large black sedan.
To buy a house or a car? Each on the surface seems to speak to a very different form of ‘self-development’, a project valued both in ‘traditional’ Tswana life and by the ‘modern’ government. Choosing one over the other presents a problematic moral choice in Botswana. Many studies around the world describe a conflict in which objects deeply enmeshed in kin and other social relations, pregnant with both meaning and social connectivity, give way to commodity forms that are so fungible as to lose rich meaning and are often seen to kill sociality itself (Comaroff and Comaroff Reference Comaroff and Comaroff1990; Ferguson Reference Ferguson1985; Shipton Reference Shipton1989; Taussig Reference Taussig1977). Cars (and roads) often invoke the mobility, spatial disruptions and speed of change of modernity (Dalakoglou and Harvey Reference Dalakoglou and Harvey2012; Menoret Reference Menoret2014; Miller Reference Miller2001); houses in anthropology have more often been studied for the way in which they reveal ‘traditional’ structures, such as the spatially inscribed oppositions between male and female, culture and nature, or public and private, whose values anchor entire lived worlds (see Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu and Bourdieu1979; Weiss Reference Weiss1996). Cars are fast wealth, houses enduring value (cf. Parry and Bloch Reference Parry and Bloch1989). Cars are often the very image of a narcissistic selfhood associated with consumer culture. They are signs and products and reproducers of wealth and class divisions (Green-Sims Reference Green-Sims2017; Lutz Reference Lutz2014). Batswana who indignantly said that some people driving cars don't even have houses to sleep in surely contrasted a selfish, individualistic modernity with a past where selfhood was embedded in sociality, and ‘wealth in people’ was valued more than wealth in things (cf. Miers and Kopytoff Reference Miers and Kopytoff1977).
Yet, the tension in Botswana between self-development and developing social connection is not new: it has been noted by anthropologists throughout the twentieth century (Alverson Reference Alverson1978; Comaroff and Comaroff Reference Comaroff and Comaroff2001; Durham Reference Durham, Comaroff and Comaroff1999a; Gulbrandsen Reference Gulbrandsen2012; Peters Reference Peters1984). A contrast between selfishness and sociality was readily invoked because it condensed not a new but a long-standing tension and moral dilemma that have become sharpened with the rapid increase in wealth and material goods as Botswana has become a middle-income country. People worry about a destructive self-fashioning, manifest especially in cars, that neglects connection with others. Yet in practice, what people do with cars and houses deepens those connections, sometimes in ways that reveal new tensions. Cars especially – and sometimes houses – deepen connections with friends as much as kin, with chosen mutualities instead of obligatory ones, and in relationships defined more by conviviality than by the conflicts that seem to define kinship in Botswana. Cars and houses remain dense with meaning, but a meaning that is fraught with new tensions and uncertainty in the context of a rapidly expanding consumer economy.
In the following, I draw on anthropological field research from 1988 to 2017. Until 2000, my research was primarily in what was called an ‘urban village’, where there was a clear downtown with many shops and services but residences were scattered in village-like compounds in seventeen wards. Not all the wards had operative headmen's courts, and few had a nucleus of a particular lineage, although some had a nucleus around a minority ethnic group. The village of some 30,000 (growing from a smaller number to a larger one over the years) retained the ‘village’ classification because many people were partially dependent on agriculture, to one degree or another. I also frequently visited other villages and agricultural holdings with my companions. By 2017, the village had been recategorized as urban, a ‘town’. In 2000, my attention shifted more to Gaborone, which had achieved city status in the mid-1980s. Most people from the urban village had spent considerable amounts of time in the city, where they worked or had relatives who worked or lived there; over time, fewer city residents spent considerable time in their home village, although all visited for shorter or longer periods. So my account traces a double journey – in time, but also in being more centred in the city, although not confined there, in the twenty-first century.
Upper middle-income materialism
Botswana, one of the poorest countries in the world when it attained independence in 1966, is now classified as an ‘upper middle-income’ country by the World Bank.Footnote 2 Along with an increasing average income has come a plethora of material goods, following not only the wealth from Botswana's diamond mines, but also the opening up of neighbouring South Africa to world markets, and the flood of cheaper goods coming from China and Asia. Where once young people in their teens and early twenties rarely wore new clothing, now they flock to the shopping malls popping up across the country to pick up torn jeans, snazzy T-shirts and figure-hugging mock leather skirts at surprisingly low prices (Durham Reference Durham, Balogun, Gilman, Graboyes and Iddrisu2019). While school-going youth in an urban village in the 1990s only fantasized about the new fried chicken franchise, today they pick up ribs and wings, hot dogs or pizza at one of the proliferating food venues and turn up their noses at the porridge-and-meat meals now sold on the street. Asbestos and zinc sheet-roofed houses built by those upgrading from mud-brick rondavels in the twentieth century are now upgraded to red-tiled roofs covering kitchens with microwaves and espresso makers and extending over parking garages that more often house people (and unused household goods) rather than the growing numbers of cars.
In this article, I examine Botswana as a middle-income country but do not isolate a middle class within it, for reasons that I hope become clear in the ethnographic details themselves. Not naming a middle class might seem surprising: in spite of a growing per capita income, in 2015 Botswana was reported as being the third most unequal country in the world in terms of income distribution (with a Gini coefficient of 60.5) – some 12 per cent of people were extremely poor, and many have incomes that are decidedly low (World Bank 2015). Economists typically delimit a middle class based on per capita measures, often income or consumption measures (Melber Reference Melber and Melber2016). In America, many focus on nuclear families as sites of middle-class reproduction, with people pouring resources into, or failing, their children. Middle classes are also identified through consumer practices that are designed to mark themselves off from lower classes and aspire towards upper ones, ostensibly expressing personal (classed) tastes or habits (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu and Nice1987; Liechty Reference Liechty2003; Veblen Reference Veblen1899). Anthropologists and sociologists sometimes seem to identify middle classes through affect: while attending to the political economies of middle-classness, Rachel Heiman et al. repeatedly point to (global) middle classes as ‘an increasingly powerful category for aspiration, longing, and anxiety’ (Reference Heiman, Freeman and Liechty2012: 7). Middle classes, in these different approaches, are often defined through individuals or, at best, nuclear-family households.
There is no doubt that people and households in Botswana can be distinguished according to each of these criteria. As Lentz (Reference Lentz and Melber2016) has noted for Africa at large, the most likely candidates to be recognized as middle-class, in terms of lifestyle, are members of that group that is also often called ‘the elites’. In Botswana in the twentieth century, ‘elites’ had privileged access to the means for building wealth through various forms of political leadership (as chiefs, elected officials and government officials); they also used that wealth to enhance their political standing (see Werbner Reference Werbner2004). A lower middle-class, one that benefited from a stable monthly income and various job perks (especially for houses and cars) and aspired to the lifestyle of elites, emerged through government employment, as elsewhere in Africa. In the twenty-first century, sources of income have diversified considerably beyond the civil service into higher-paying private-sector employment and entrepreneurial ventures, but they have become much more unstable, while unemployment remains high: if income is the source of middle-class status, then that status here has become as precarious as elsewhere, even as national averages rise.
Concerns about the skewed distribution of wealth in the country's early years focused on access to cattle; highly concentrated ownership was ameliorated to some (moderate and declining) degree by extensive sharing of livestock through cattle loans and by using poorer families to take care of herds (Jefferis and Kelly Reference Jefferis and Kelly1999; Molutsi Reference Molutsi1988; Parson Reference Parson1981). While cattle and livestock retain considerable symbolic and economic value in the country today (see Solway Reference Solway2016b), the economy is rapidly shifting to a small enterprise and, especially, a service economy. Provisioning food, maid services, crèches for childcare and car washes, as well as staffing the proliferating retail shops, are now important parts of the new entrepreneurial moment and money economy. In the past, cooking, caring, washing, cleaning and helping in selling were part of labour exchanges within households and helped define kin, often in very unequal ways; now, many of these activities are part of a paid-service economy. Needless to say, when such activities are paid, the pay is low; maids might earn US$80 per month, and shop clerks only marginally more. In the midst of this, there is great anxiety about a weakening of the moral bonds of kinship, and an increase in consumer-based materialism (Dahl Reference Dahl2014; Livingston Reference Livingston2009). Weddings have become tournaments of material values, where invited guests measure the success of the wedding and the couple by the amounts spent on venue, food, entertainment and clothing (van Dijk Reference van Dijk, Gewald, Leliveld and Peša2012; Solway Reference Solway2016a); they are no longer displays of neighbourhood solidarity and the ability to attract large crowds through generosity in food and sentiment.
Today, as in the past, material plenty and its benefits circulate far beyond those with wealth. Unemployed twenty-somethings, living in small rented rooms, buy clothes, eat ribs and chips (fries), go to clubs and spend hours on mobile phones that cost money. A forty-year-old earning about US$100 a month as a maid hires a tutor for her son, frequently travels back and forth from the city to the town where she works, and occasionally helps her niece who needs to be sent bus fares each month for school. The money for these things circulates between kin, lovers and friends, and through a variety of rotating credit and small-scale loan-sharking arrangements in ways that are impossible to fully gauge. And these people – the young women, the maid, the niece – spend considerable amounts of time in the homes of relatives and childhood friends, which are filled with material goods and abundant food. Benefiting from this dispersal of material well-being, many or most of those with small or even no recorded income can be encompassed in the middle-income country.
A tension between displays of individual accomplishment and the mutuality built up in (often unequal) material and sentimental exchanges is long-standing in Botswana. People have admired the hard work, cleverness and risks taken by others made manifest in material goods, whether from migrant labour or other daring forays, sturdy agricultural endeavour, trade, or playing politics (Alverson Reference Alverson1978; Durham Reference Durham, Comaroff and Comaroff1999a). They are attentive, too, to the ways in which one's personhood is entangled with that of a wide array of other people, through various forms of mutuality and intersubjectivity, including shared practical activities and material exchanges, and also the effects of love, jealousy and anger (Durham Reference Durham1995; Reference Durham2002; Durham and Klaits Reference Durham and Klaits2002; Klaits Reference Klaits2010; Lambek and Solway Reference Lambek and Solway2001). The tension between personal achievement and social mutualization is both productive and a source of ongoing anxiety, because the two sides are heavily dependent on each other (see Reece Reference Reece2019). The evidence of successful social interdependencies is physical well-being. Material well-being is unsupportable without continually investing in social mutualities: one risks jealousy, witchcraft, theft and isolation. The entanglement of individual success with material and sentimental investment in others has been a long-standing problem for most people of Botswana, always shifting with changes in the larger political economy. By 2014, with the rapid increase in material wealth, these anxieties, and the tensions between self and society, fixed on cars and houses.
Cars and houses and national development
Many of the self-congratulatory speeches and statements about Botswana's success refer to transportation. At Independence Day celebrations in 2014, for example, the third sentence of President Ian Khama's address noted that:
Our younger generation may find it hard to believe such facts as that back then [1966] our annual per capita income was only 84 US dollars, whereas today it is USD 7,700, that then there were only 6 kilometres of paved roads in the entire country, as compared to over 6,400 today.Footnote 3
Measures of success in transportation often refer to numbers of kilometres of roads, paved and otherwise. Development reports also count the number of vehicles owned in Botswana. The number of vehicles is growing, according to the 2009–16 National Development Plan, by over 9 per cent per annum, far faster than the growth in the population (1.9 per cent in the 2011 census). The car occupancy ratio was halved in just ten years: twelve persons per car in 1996 and six per car in 2006 (Ranko and Bolaane Reference Ranko and Bolaane2011). The numbers of cars and roads are used to convey national success, are linked to income figures and signify progress – until the numbers associated with road accidents are raised, as accident and fatality rates are high even for the region.Footnote 4
Mention of houses in Botswana's development talk, by contrast, tends to refer to shortcomings. Efforts to reform, civilize or modernize people in Botswana have focused on housing since the first missionary presence (Comaroff and Comaroff Reference Comaroff and Comaroff1997), and concern with housing seems only to have grown over the decades since independence. While the first national development plan published by an independent Botswana, in 1968, notes the inadequacy of housing for the broader population, its section on housing is almost entirely about how to provide adequate housing for a new cadre of civil servants – the foundation, in Botswana, as in much of Africa, of a new middle class and a modernist social structure. There have never been enough houses – not even of houses that are made of undesirable substances (dung-and-earth mud brick, thatching, pounded dirt floors), let alone those whose materials (cement, metal, and more recently red brick and roof tiles) qualify them as ‘modern’ and ‘high-quality’.Footnote 5 Government officers, media and people, when speaking in public forums or to me privately about the various efforts to spur building, improvement or ownership of (modern) housing, have consistently referred to failures: shortfalls in the projected number of units built by the Botswana Housing Commission (BHC) and the failure of occupants to buy them; the inadequacies of the Self-Help Housing Agency (SHHA) to meet the needs of burgeoning urban migration (whether in numbers of dwellings or their condition); or the continuing presence of people in rural areas without proper housing.
People complain that plots of land are no longer being allocated in denser settlements where they want to build houses, while they find urban rents too high for accommodation that is too small. A government refusal to subsidize popular housing (insisting that the BHC and SHHA fund themselves through sales) is accompanied by generous loan schemes and subsidies to those on the government payroll, and both sides of the coin (the subsidized and unsubsidized) complain. It is in allocations and privileges relating to housing that people see nepotism and corruption, not cars.Footnote 6 People were fascinated in the 2010s by news images of stampedes when plots of land were opened for application. President Khama's signature project to deal with abject poverty in the country involved persuading private parties to donate housing (and blankets): state media in 2014 and 2017 often showed a smiling president next to aged ‘destitutes’ receiving such houses. These ceremonies seemed only to illustrate ongoing poverty and homelessness in this upper middle-income country.Footnote 7 If cars are used to index the success of Botswana's development project, housing is used to point out failures.
But cars also bring problems. Traffic jams are a new daily reality in the capital city. Mieke Ritsema, arguing that people of Botswana associated development with death in the early 2000s, noted that traffic fatalities were seen as ‘equally problematic’ to AIDS deaths, even though there were just 526 traffic fatalities in a year compared with 26,000 AIDS deaths (Ritsema Reference Ritsema2008: 94; cf. Lamont Reference Lamont2012 on ‘accidents’ as epidemiology in East Africa). In 2014, with access to antiretroviral therapy widespread, there was what many health workers in the region called ‘AIDS fatigue’ in the country, and anxiety focused instead on unemployment, crime, alcohol and drugs. Car accidents similarly receded from public commentary as a state of emergency. They no longer jostled with AIDS when people talked about the problems of the present; they seemed an expected part of life's misfortunes, and the fact that many fatal accidents were said to take place in shared minivan buses/taxis implied that more private cars might be the solution. Newspaper reports of car accidents and deaths in 2014 did not generate any ‘moral panic’ about something being wrong with society among people I knew. By contrast, news accounts of break-ins, beatings and killings of people in their houses, perpetrated by thieves and gangs, did reverberate with moral panic. If that panic reveals a perceived connection between development and death, as Ritsema suggested, houses now provoke more anxiety than cars.
People and their houses
That people in Botswana should have houses before cars seems, on some level, obvious. The international Universal Declaration of Human Rights includes ‘adequate housing’ among human rights; it does not call for everyone to have cars.Footnote 8 People have had, or ought to have had, houses in Botswana for centuries. Cars are a fairly recent arrival, supplanting oxen, which were ridden, and later horses and donkeys – and, of course, feet. Today, a citizen can apply to a local land board for land in ‘communal’ areas and be allotted a plot on which to build. She or he will need to fence and put up a structure on the land in order to keep the plot, but the structure could be a simple mud-brick or reed house (or, as people like to say, just a pit latrine). Plots and houses are inherited by kin; only when deserted do they return to the land board for reallocation. Plots are easy to acquire in rural areas, but in the larger villages and in those close to large cities people expect to wait many years to be allocated a plot, and scams have proliferated in such areas. Having developed a plot, the builder can then sell the house, and the land usufruct will be transferred. Inside the cities themselves, where land is freehold, one must buy land (with its structures) from a previous owner. There is a vibrant market in both areas.
Batswana typically had multiple houses scattered across the countryside. In the agricultural economy that dominated until recent decades, people lived in family compounds in a central village (with populations ranging from hundreds to tens of thousands), but they also built shelters of one kind or another on their agricultural lands lying outside the villages, and at cattle posts located yet further out. Village houses were more substantial; cattle post houses could be equally substantial, or, like many of the houses by agricultural fields, simple shelters lacking walls or, sometimes, roofs. In the past decade or so, some people have started building up ‘farms’, some outfitted for comfortable full-time residence, holiday getaways and weekend parties. To these multiple houses, some have added more: a house near salaried work, and houses to rent out (even manual workers have invested in rentals; see Werbner Reference Werbner2014). Those living in cities build houses in their home villages, which are the sites of their birth and marriage and of deaths in their family (Durham Reference Durham, Mines and Yazgi2010); these often serve as housing for un- and underemployed offspring or kin. One man in his early fifties told me that, unlike in Canada, where he had spent time, houses in villages are ‘free’: no taxes, he said, no insurance, and no utility bills if you didn't want them. Some young people I talked to had inherited village houses from parents who had died of AIDS; these houses might indeed be essentially ‘free’, but they were also a burden to youth living in a distant city. What is more, inherited houses had not been built by the inheritor, and, unless significantly modified, were subject to contentious claims by other descendants of the builder. Although identities are built up in many different ways in Botswana, the village ‘home’ is often the deepest anchor. And everyone – even those without houses to sleep in there – ought to have such a home, a place where she or he has the right to be at home (kwa gae). To be houseless is not, after all, to be homeless.
Those without a house are often transporting building supplies for houses they are building in one site or another. (Having a car helps.) Such construction projects spin out over years, as people buy a window frame here, a door there, some panels of roofing, or as they hire builders to put up a few courses of the cement blocks that they have gradually acquired. Most village compounds have at least one building that is in a state of semi-construction, as well as one in a state of abandoned collapse. In the 1960s and early 1970s, a ‘consciously proud’ man told Hoyt Alverson: ‘We make everything we want from local materials, while Europeans have to spend money in stores’ (Alverson Reference Alverson1978: 137). Mud-brick homes are often the ongoing product of shared labour (although skilled thatching must be paid for): in preparation for a wedding or a coming-out party for a baby, women related to the house owner work together to plaster the outside and the courtyard of mud-brick homes with smooth, attractive, mud-dung slurry. The refreshed home advertises the bonds of care of that family, manifest in the physical well-being of the house as well as in the (plump) body of the bride or baby. And mud-brick houses could be built by the poor but industrious: I watched one unmarried mother of several children laboriously build a mud-brick house on a tiny plot she had been allocated in one of the large villages in the 1990s. She commented to me, as we sat looking at the emerging house, that no one would come to her funeral, as she could serve nothing but cabbage: her mud-brick home was a sign of poverty, not pride.Footnote 9
Mud bricks were free, but at that time those with some means often added concrete block making in their home compounds to a diverse set of income-generating activities. Block and brick making were vocational skills taught in ‘Brigades’ schools, and pictures of men – always men – making blocks frequently illustrated the published national development plans in the 1960s and 1970s. The wooden moulds for the blocks were borrowed from kin or neighbours, or purchased along with bags of cement. Sand, mixed in with the cement to make the concrete mixture, in quantities usually rather higher than recommended, could be dug out of a nearby riverbed, if you had transport. Alternatively, some people dug sand out of the paths and roads that circled around compounds in the village wards. The roads then became difficult to navigate in the popular Toyota Corolla. After being packed into moulds, the cement cured slowly and needed frequent watering over several days, which meant that someone, often a dependant or paid helper, needed to live at or near the building site or village home enterprise. By the 2010s, large concrete block factories with Chinese names proliferated around Gaborone, cutting into but not entirely cutting out the small-scale home enterprises. In 1990, people often reflected that the older mud-brick homes were warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer. By the 2010s, no younger people rhapsodized about mud bricks, instead preferring air conditioning and electric heat. A middle-aged official in the Ministry of Lands and Housing said to me, disapprovingly, that youth complaining about housing could just build a mud-brick house on plots they must develop to keep; instead, they all plan to build ‘a two-storey home’. Whether they planned it to be two storeys (unusual outside the capital city) or not, young people I interviewed in 2014 did estimate spending some 100,000 pula (about US$9,300) for a ‘basic house’ on plots they were acquiring – the same, one young man told me, that you would spend on ‘a good-quality car’.
Frederick Klaits has written about ‘housing activity’ in Botswana as the process of making places for the ‘moral passions’ of caring, loving, scorning, being jealous, and other sentiments that shape the well-being of self and others in emotional and material exchanges (Klaits Reference Klaits2010). University students I interviewed in 2014 described their house-building aspirations with the goal of caring for others (children and foster children). Building houses for others is integral to self-making. Students, who saved and raised money in savings clubs called motshelo, sometimes – even often – used that money to buy furniture for their mothers or to electrify their homes. Many of the activities that characterize a house – sweeping and cleaning, bathing, doing laundry, cooking – are activities that pronounce one's caring for others and that promote their well-being. But households are also sites of personal tensions that can have dramatic effects: car accidents might be the (spiritually produced) outcome of jealousies and resentments in the household, or an angry wife might pour boiling water over her husband in his bath (see Lambek and Solway Reference Lambek and Solway2001; Durham Reference Durham and Masquelier2005), or a relative who is pressed into doing too much labour might redefine herself as a servant (Reece Reference Reece2019).
This idea of home – as a site of belonging and caring (spoken of with the terms gae, home, or ntlo, house, or kwa lwapeng, at the homesite) – is quite different from the idea of home as a site where one's independent selfhood is made manifest in decoration, consumer goods and personal comfort, as expected in the West (Rybczynski Reference Rybczynski1986). And yet houses do signal individual status and achievement. A service worker told me of the number of houses owned by an aunt, hugging herself as she spoke about the smoothness of the beautiful tile floors; she was telling me about her aunt's noteworthy accomplishments, at the same time as conveying how she herself shared in the lovely floors. Owning a house in Phakalane, the ‘golf estate’ where many university faculty and upper-echelon civil servants live, is a statement about personal achievements, one that can badly strain a lecturer's income, as he or she must balance the costs of living there with not only nuclear family expenses but also expectations of help from wider kin.
People and their cars
Cars were more obvious, and visible, displays of individual accomplishment and individuality. One professional woman told me that her mother was always pressing her to get a car so that it could be parked in front of the mother's village house on visits, to be seen by neighbours. As with cars elsewhere, makes are important: everyone I talked to could rattle off the models of Mercedes, Audis and the like. In the early 1990s, living in a large urban village, people identified each other as readily by the cars they were driving (those few who had cars) as by their gait and dress. ‘There is so-and-so,’ my companions would say, observing a car at a distance – not only did they recognize make and colour, they also knew everyone's licence plate number.
In villages in the mid-1990s, any vehicle was highly valued. Over the past few years, large numbers of almost-new cars have made their way into Southern Africa from export networks centred in Japan and, to a lesser extent, Singapore (Brooks Reference Brooks2011; Livingston Reference Livingston2009).Footnote 10 In 2017, it became a joke that I had paid US$15,000 for a new Honda Fit in the US: ‘Debbie!’ an acquaintance gasped with laughter, ‘you could get a Fit here for 10,000 pula [US$1,000]!’ (I probably could have bought one for US$2,000.) Cars now seem remarkably affordable; what is more difficult to attain, for many, is the licence to drive one.Footnote 11 Battered, barely functioning cars bounce along the village byways or navigate the traffic of the city; they mix with elegant and powerful Audis and spotless compact Hyundais, and now many fit-looking Fits. People want to be seen in, and feel good in, nice cars: those with older cars often apologized to me, and others take on considerable debt to drive a fine vehicle (Livingston Reference Livingston2009). Young women pointed out their ‘dream cars’ to me as if they were fashion accessories.
But cars are not just displayed. People do things with cars (see also Green-Sims Reference Green-Sims2017). Much of what they do deepens and extends, and sometimes frays, their connections with others. I was often told that one of the men in the village in the 1990s slept with ‘all’ the local young women. I would ask what the young girls saw in him – he was, to my mind, paunchy and middle-aged. ‘He has a car,’ everyone answered – a very old, battered pickup, yet still a vehicle. Young girls, they said, liked being seen riding in a car. On Botswana TV in 2017, a man in a large black new car, typically a Mercedes, was inevitably a married pursuer of girlfriends he would later abandon. In one episode of Itshireletse, a popular docudrama series produced by the police illustrating and discussing ‘how to avoid crime’ (Muyakwabo Reference Muyakwabo2012), a young woman is impregnated by a (married) man who has housed and dined her extravagantly and has showered her with gifts. Upon discovering the pregnancy, he pushes her out of his expensive car and drives away.Footnote 12
One day in 2014, a woman regaled me with story after story about her family, as we lounged in her late mother's house. Her sister was about to be married, but ‘the uncles’ had refused to negotiate with the groom's family. My raconteuse, whose lively tales were interspersed with sound effects and dramatic gestures, fantasized about her sister, after marriage, driving up to the village in a shiny, new, large black car on a rainy night, and passing an uncle walking in the pouring rain. The sister would lower the driver's window – ‘Brrrzzh,’ said the raconteuse, gesturing with her finger to simulate the operation of the electric window – just part way, and say, sweetly, ‘Hello uncle.’ Then she would close the window – ‘Brrrzzh’, the finger delicately pressing the imaginary button – and drive on to the family compound, where the uncle would arrive much later, very wet. By 2017, the now-married sister parked her shiny new car in the family village compound; according to my storyteller, the uncles’ wives were agog over the car and asked to be driven places in it. Insofar as both houses and cars are the sites of social action, they bring people together and are significant vehicles for the domestic tensions and disputes for which Botswana is so well known in anthropological literature (see Comaroff and Roberts Reference Comaroff and Roberts1981; Griffiths Reference Griffiths1997; Reece Reference Ranko and Bolaane2019).
The multiple houses people have suggest high levels of mobility (as does the dispersal of people through education, employment and urban migration). And this is indeed the case. You can take a bus, or share a taxi, or try to get a lift from friends or relatives. People stand on the roadside flagging down traffic with a gentle downward flutter of the outstretched hand, hoping to be picked up and, not infrequently, packed into the back of a pickup truck. For this they pay about the same as a bus fare for petrol; if the driver picks up enough people, he or she covers the cost of petrol, and of the wear and tear on the car, many times over. Licensed taxi drivers sometimes complain about the fares they lose to people making an extra pula on the side.
Picking up someone you know on the roadside is an opportunity to gather information (not only for anthropologists), or to issue commands. One very dark rainy night in the 1990s, my husband and I were picked up while hitching between city and village by a man in a large Mercedes (who said he recognized us), the leather interior gleaming and with a new car smell. The driver soon stopped to pick up a bedraggled man in near-rags, as dirty as one might be after a rainy day's labour at the cattle post, smelling strongly of the work he had been doing. The new passenger was grilled about the location of cattle and conditions out there – and then given a series of instructions for when he returned. Meanwhile, he dripped mud all over the new upholstery and spotless carpeting.
In the 1990s, having a clean car was as important as wearing clean, neatly ironed clothes; like clothing, clean cars were ‘communities of practice’ (on clothing, see Durham Reference Durham1999b; on cars as communities of practice, see Graves-Brown Reference Graves-Brown1997: 66ff). Passengers tossed chicken bones, fruit seeds and other rubbish on the floor – possibly because most people who had cars also had an unflagging supply of small labourers available to clean their cars. Pulling into a family compound, a driver would call out to the boys playing nearby to clean the car. They would go and fetch buckets of water and rags and brushes and would scrupulously clean the car inside and out, seemingly with great pleasure and pride. While they might hope for some small change to buy sweets with, or to be given a plate of food, they worked as part of the give and take, or caring, of everyday life.Footnote 13 By 2014, car washing had become a widespread form of small business, the first step for many, as the government loudly promoted youth entrepreneurship. The cities and larger villages supported numerous car-washing ventures, which ranged from a set-up on a dusty public walkway with a barrel of water and an overturned cement block for the washers to sit on while waiting for customers, to aggressive men with buckets at parking lots near shops, to a group of young men supplied from a pickup who came daily to where office workers parked, to more permanent structures of posts, shade screens or tarpaulins along with benches or chairs with beverages for purchase. A car wash, inside and out, cost about 20 pula in 2017, or US$2, about the same as a street-side meal popular with labourers and office workers. One young woman whose brother had opened such a business after graduating from secondary school said that its success, at least initially, depended on how many relatives, friends and acquaintances you could attract; this is continuous, perhaps, with the practices of the past, but looks forward to a more capitalized entrepreneurial economy in the future. Interestingly, as car cleaning became more commoditized, it seemed to me that more cars on the roads were dirty.
Cars also kill and maim. Studies of the many ways in which people talk about roads and road accidents across Africa show that the dangers associated with road travel emerge from a long history of corvée labour and labour migration, the channelling of travel away from familiar pathways to alienating routes, and the spiritual forces that have long trespassed across (and obscured) the lines between moral and immoral behaviours (Masquelier Reference Masquelier2002; White Reference White1993). Car accidents can be the product of jealousy or anger, the downside of mutual personhood and entanglement. A string of car accidents in a family raises suspicion about rancour and ill will within that family, or of jealousy from neighbours, as I heard in the village in the 1990s. The 2014 death in a car accident of the popular leader of a national opposition party, Gomolemo Motswaledi, just months before a national election, was hotly debated in the press and on the streets. While the government said that he died in a single-car crash after possibly visiting a woman, others suspected agents of the ruling party, a suspicion that resonated with people's expectation that some accidents are caused by ill will.
Rosalind Morris (Reference Morris2010) suggests that car deaths come to be ‘accidents’, and not ‘caused’ by traceable (and treatable) ill will, in a new neoliberal context that foregrounds contingency in temporal thinking and risk management in governmentality (see also Lamont Reference Lamont2012). People in Botswana today attribute most road accidents not to ill will but to the reckless indifference of drivers who drive too fast on roads that suddenly erupt in potholes and fissures or sport stray cattle and donkeys, who ignore traffic signals or fail to stop and yield at crossings, who overtake on curves and hills where they are unable to see oncoming vehicles or play chicken with them, and who stop to pick up more beer from the roadside bars. Such drivers self-indulge without thinking of others. One of Ritsema's informants suggested that traffic fatalities are caused by people who ‘have cars which are luxurious … They drive recklessly’ (Ritsema Reference Ritsema2008: 102).Footnote 14 Whether in relation to reckless driving or in active ill will, the car is talked about as a promotion of self, and not mutuality (whether positive or negative). Yet most vehicle casualties involved the combis (minivans), small buses or packed pickups that toss passengers willy-nilly when they overturn, and my informants blamed owners who are too cheap to maintain their vehicles or pay better drivers. At the same time, these crashes remind us that most vehicles are shared.
Accidents also bring people together in more positive ways – or allow people to display indifference. People injured are visited frequently by well-wishers who bring food, sing hymns and provide comfort, hastening the recovery of the injured, and assuring him or her that they were not the ill-wishers behind the accident. One might wonder, as I did in 2014, about a woman who did not visit her injured husband in hospital. Kin, churches, work colleagues, association members and friends organize such visits. Even funerals bring people together in attempts to affirm positive mutuality with the dead, and, as is the case when mutualities are formed, fan conflicts and contests of affection and jealousy (Durham Reference Durham2002).
Moralities of materialism in Botswana
Funerals and weddings in the early 1990s were arenas of material display and plenty. The young mother building her own mud-brick house bemoaned that no one would come to her funeral because there would be only cabbage to eat, and not the heaped plates of meat that people anticipated. Among Herero, women dressed in their most colourful best and were carefully made up; men and Tswana people dressed just as well, if more soberly. Associations, kin and friends often donned identical outfits or shared clothing, vividly displaying mutualities. The food and fancy dress were supposed to be for the benefit of others, to ensure well-being and good sentiments for the consumers that would rebound to the provider and bind everyone in mutualities that combined sentiment and material well-being (Durham Reference Durham2002), even as they were displays of personal success. Outside these venues, cars and houses were the most prominent arenas of display of accomplishment and also a means to enact help, care, kinship and friendship – and also to signal indifference as people could be ‘chased’ from houses and left out of cars. Today, these arenas – funerals and weddings, cars and houses – are joined by a plethora of material goods, made available through increasing incomes, government support of entrepreneurialism and the emergence of a service sector, and especially the flood of cheap goods from China and elsewhere. And some of these things generate social commentary and reveal tensions (clothing is, unsurprisingly, prominent). In 2014, however, it was cars and houses that condensed the moral dilemmas of personhood, wealth and things.
As noted, people have long valued the signs of individual, personal accomplishment in Botswana, but they have also been strongly attentive to the ways in which they are entangled with others sentimentally, materially and morally, with these fields having a physical as well as a social effect in their bodies and well-being. This is different from the contrast made by James Ferguson (Reference Ferguson2013) between a Western-valued liberal agentive individualism, freed from depending on others, and the often sought-after dependencies and hierarchies that connect people in kinship-like domains to support them during duress. To achieve as an individual in Botswana does not free one from one's connectedness with others, from conviviality; indeed, achievement, while redounding to the person (who might be clever, or a hard worker, or just likeable as a person), is often partly supported by sentimental, material or other dispositions from others. And simply deflecting or avoiding enmity and jealousy is important: jealousy harms its object simply through emotional force, much as caring or loving supports it. Yet the fields of freedom and constraint are important in the new materialities and their tensions.
Students of middle-class formation in Africa often focus on how those with means ‘enclave’ or protect wealth from demanding kin (Ferguson Reference Ferguson2015; Meyer Reference Meyer1995; cf. Hull Reference Hull2020); middle classes are expected to focus on personal development and guard boundaries of class and of nuclear family. In Botswana in 2014–17, people did invest heavily in their own children, especially in increasingly differentiated education, and did work to protect much of their wealth from wide circles of kin, even as they also often came to their aid when truly needed. Many of the most fractious kin disputes – with families almost severed from one another – take place around the inheritance or use of material belongings, from beds to livestock, and, of course, houses. But the use of things is another matter. The new material plenty of Botswana has made it possible – and very common – for the distribution of the benefits of these things (material items, houses, cars, loans or investments) to extend far within and beyond the demanding, caring and fraught obligations of kin.
It has been a core argument of this article that focusing on a middle class in Botswana (whether identified as elites, or measured by income, or even lifestyle) misses the wider participation in the ‘middle income’ of the country. This is especially because of the way in which ‘middle class’ is often theorized through the individual (income) or nuclear family. Clearly, in Botswana, we also need to be attentive to the ways in which material well-being is shared, whether through the small gifts of money that move in often untraceable ways, or in the widespread hosting and sharing of things such as houses and their appurtenances, cars and clothing. A woman who cleans a house three times a week, and barely has furniture in her home, sits and watches television for hours in a friend's home; a woman in the low-paid service sector drives an ailing man's car around for him, while he hires her cousin for cleaning. Children of these women stay in the large, granite-countered house of relatives in the city, where they go to school, playing video games on the large flatscreen TV.
While anthropologists have noted that middle-income, middle-class people in Africa often continue to distribute to a range of relatives (see Lentz Reference Lentz2020), it is also notable how a new material plenty allows more intensive friendship work (see, for example, Bocast Reference Bocast2017; Moore Reference Moore2018). Houses house not only nieces and nephews needing places to stay while at school or looking for work, but also many friends from childhood, schools, or even work. Those with four-bedroom houses in the city open them for short and long stays to childhood friends, who come in and cook in the convection oven, enjoy the decadent-seeming baths, and sit by the pool watching children while the owner is at work. Those with tile-floored ‘farm’ houses in the cattle-post areas host fiftieth birthday parties or weekend getaways with friends from schooldays. Friendship is, as Julian Pitt-Rivers (Reference Pitt-Rivers2016 [1983]) noted some time ago, different from kinship, although the two are often brought together in various ways. Pitt-Rivers noted the freedom of choice in friends, and drew on the morality of the gift to discuss the moralities of friendship. In Botswana, ‘giving’ between kin is highly obligatory, and highly contested, and strongly marks familial hierarchies and inequalities; among friends, giving is voluntary, subject to both warm appreciation and joking but effective denials, and, because of its voluntarism and the joking refusals of playful demands, it is egalitarian at its base, if marked with inequalities in other ways (Durham Reference Durham1995). We might note from the above that cars provoked division and sometimes anger between kin and lovers, while friends knew that they could not always be accommodated and were grateful for rides. Friendship has always been highly important in Botswana, but in a time of such material plenty, it may be playing a more significant role in the distribution of material well-being on a daily basis.
And friendships may pose new problems. Today, among mature people, friendship and the material distributions it brings span income and class differences. Many of this generation grew up in villages and towns where they went to school with a wide variety of others, and where they formed deep bonds in mixed-class churches, choirs and other associations. These are the friends who host and help and share. But material plenty divides friendships, too, and growing geographies of income and/or class – Phakalane Estates, for example – along with an increase in private schooling and paid memberships in clubs or specialized activities mean that many younger people now form friendships within economic strata. And some friends engage in activities that exclude instead of share – with evenings celebrating birthdays or upcoming weddings at expensive restaurants or new event venues outside the cities, and trips to South Africa or elsewhere. The women who celebrated a fiftieth birthday at a chicken farm started by one of them were all professionals; a couple of marginally employed young women sharing a small backyard room for about US$60 per month socialized at parties with low entry fees, mostly with similarly marginally employed or unemployed educated youth. Friends provide a new wealth in people – people whose associations are more egalitarian at the present time, perhaps, but that have the potential to stratify in the future. What is more, for some, stronger engagement in these forms of friendship rather than in kinship poses problems for attaining the types of maturity recognized as ‘adulthood’ in Botswana – where maturity is achieved within the hierarchical nature of kin (Solway Reference Solway, Durham and Solway2017) and through unequal patron–client relationships with others. Perhaps friends are ever-young.
In the rumoured, troubling choice between cars and houses, on one level people were complaining about selfishness and failure to care for others. Cars have often been signs of self-development in Botswana, whether in national discourse or for admiring individuals, and houses never seemed to meet expectations. The idea of a completely self-made person, displayed in a fancy car, made people tremendously uneasy. But people also knew the impossibility of self-determination: selfhood could only be made, and was liable to be unmade, through acts of caring, anger, jealousies and sharing. Cars, houses and other things carried all these moral sentiments, and all cars and houses were enmeshed in these transmissions, even as they also announced personal accomplishment. Looking at what people actually do with cars and houses reveals that cars are as often used for sociality, good or bad, as for individual self-fashioning, while houses display accomplishment even as they are sites of care, dispute and family building. But perhaps the complaints were not just identifying a tension between self-fashioning and the webs of care – which they clearly were – but also revealed an unease with the choices people make about with whom to forge mutualities, choices that often reach more into friendships than kinship. And this is where the story of the big black car in the rain, bypassing the bedraggled uncle, speaks most subtly to this predicament of material wealth: the niece's choice of (a very companionate) spouse, entangling the open choice of companionship with the structured life of kinship, the display of personal accomplishment with the sharp divisions of wealth in a family. But, in the end, everyone got rides in the car, although invitations to her large, urban marital house were few.
Acknowledgements
Research in 2014 was supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Stipend and a Fulbright Senior Scholar Research Grant. Research in 2017 was funded by a grant from Sweet Briar College Faculty Grants. Research between 1989 and 2000 was funded, variously, by a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship, NSF (the National Science Foundation), NEH, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the American Philosophical Society and Sweet Briar College Faculty Grants. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the African Studies Workshop at the Department of African and African-American Studies at Harvard University and at the Satterthwaite Colloquium on African Religion and Ritual in the UK, and benefited especially from comments and suggestions from John and Jean Comaroff, Jeremy Jones and Richard and Pnina Werbner. It has also benefited from comments and suggestions from Keith Adams, Jennifer Cole and Jacqueline Solway, and from the inspiring set of papers presented across four sessions at the African Studies Association of the United Kingdom's conference in 2016, along with comments, discussion and suggestion from all involved, and, finally, from reviewers and editors at Africa.
