Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 November 2008
Botswana has achieved rapid growth with stability since independence in 1966, largely through the supportive interrelations between an open market economy and a system of élite democracy, successfully blending ‘traditional’ and modern elements, and offering a range of fairly free and meaningful political choices. But growth, and the policies of a selectively interventionist state, have produced increasingly deep inequalities of property and incomes, posing problems for the stability of the political economy in future.
1 The Tswana are ‘among the most rigidly stratified of any in southern Africa’, according to Holm, John D., ‘Botswana: a paternalistic democracy’, in Diamond, Larry, Linz, Juan J., and Lipset, Seymour Martin (eds.), Democracy in Developing Countries, Vol. 2, Africa (Boulder and London, 1988), p. 183.Google ScholarPeters, Pauline E., ‘Struggles Over Water, Struggles Over Meaning: cattle, water and the state in Botswana’, in Africa (London), 54, 3, 1984, p. 33, refers to ‘the highly centralised hierarchical’ Tswana chiefdoms.Google Scholar
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25 Botswana experienced ‘the most rapid rate of growth of GNP per capita (8·3 per cent) of any country in the world’ from 1965 to 1985, according to Harvey, Charles and Lewis, Stephen R. Jr., Policy Choice and Development Performance in Botswana (London, 1990), p. 1.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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93 At the end of the 1970s it was stated in Wily, op. cit. p. 94, that much of the direction of policy making on ranching and tenure ‘does not bode well for any poor tribesman, let alone San’.
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