the State and the Social
Machiavelli (1977: 47) observed long ago that ‘every prince’ would like to be both loved and feared. And ‘since it is hard to accommodate both of these qualities, if you have to make a choice, to be feared is much safer than to be loved'. Nevertheless, he asserts, ‘every prince should prefer to be considered merciful rather than cruel'. This was, as we shall see, clearly a strategy adopted by the postcolonial ruling group from the outset, and I shall argue that the modern state in Botswana prevails to a great extent because the ruling group's domination is achieved and reproduced in relation to the population with a minimal exercise of perceived violent, coercive power. Paradoxically perhaps, the broader significance of this point is suggested by a study of authoritarian regimes as extreme as Mobuto's Zaire. Schatzberg (1988: 71–72) argues that no state can rely entirely on coercion for long: ‘Although regimes may arrive in power and initially maintain themselves through force, they most often achieve stability and continuity by encouraging citizens to accept valid symbols and metaphors of authority'. Legitimacy in the population is in other words crucial for the sustainable strength of the state.
In the present case, legitimation involved, at Botswana's independence, the challenge to make such a Western phenomenon as a modern state comprehensible, acceptable and even attractive to the population. Following Taylor's (1999: 127) rendering of Hegel, this is a matter of preventing ‘alienation’ from arising. Alienation, in the Hegelian sense, ‘arises where important ideas of man and society and their relation to nature embodied in the institutions of a given society cease to be those by which its members identify themselves'. This means that the introduction of all the new institutions of a modern state – as in the present case – represents a formidable challenge of ensuring popular identification. As we shall see, this is not only a matter of designing policies to meet expectations that are already prevalent in the population. From the outset the state leadership made tremendous efforts – by local encounters with people all over the country – to explain and discuss in detail the significance of all the ‘development’ programmes that have been recurrently launched.
We shall see that the major changes effected by this leadership did not conflict with ‘tradition’ in any significant respect, one important condition being that the symbolism of authority vested in kingship (bogosi) and anchored in indigenous cosmology has, at all times, capacitated the dikgosi to engage in radical transformations like changing major ritual and social practices to satisfy evangelising missionaries. This point is reflected in state agents’ manifold efforts to develop an imaginary of the state that has resonance in a population highly committed to virtues of authority vested in indigenous cosmology.
At the same time I am centrally concerned with the ways in which the modern state in Botswana, through its interventions in the population in the Foucauldian (1978) sense, works upon popular consciousness in ways that generate subjectivities with ‘ideas’ congruent with those vested in modern state institutions. This brings me beyond issues of legitimacy since, in my view, the development of the postcolonial state in Botswana cannot alone be comprehended in terms of popular appreciative imaginary of the state. Its strength and stability rest also upon state practices in relation to social and material realities by which the population are brought into the web of power centred in the state. This is a major problem of the social, which I shall address by an approach much inspired by Deleuze/Guattari, Foucault, and Kapferer. This approach recognizes the distinctiveness of the dynamics of the state yet rejects any notion of the state as a freestanding entity as its point of analytical departure. It does not, therefore, reduce the state to ‘a fiction of the philosophers’ (Radcliffe-Brown 1940: xxiii) or an ideological construction (Mitchell 1999: 95) or an ‘illusion’ (Asad 2004: 282), but recognizes the sociomaterial reality of any state.
I see the state as vested with inherent dynamics that, in the words of Kapferer (2008: 3), ‘is oriented to achieving an exclusive and overarching determining potency in the fields of social relations in which it is situated and which state or state-related practice attempts to refine’ (see also Kapferer 1997: 274ff.). The state is hence always in the making, which is a conception of the state that corresponds to Deleuze and Guattari's (1984: 360) notion of the state as sovereignty, yet it ‘only reigns over what it is capable of internalising, appropriating locally'. Although Foucault (1980: 121) abandons the Hobbesian notion of ‘sovereignty’ as expressed in his famous statement of a need ‘to cut off the King's head’, he similarly recognizes the ‘omnipotence’ of the state. Not as a fixed capacity, but as an independent ‘super-structural’ force that dominates by virtue of its capacity to control ‘a whole series of already existing power networks’ (1980: 122).
Note, however, that this is not simply a notion opposite to that of Hobbes' Leviathan, in the sense of conceiving the force of the state as a matter of ‘power comes from below’ (cf. Sahlins 1999: 37). Beside the conception of the state as omnipotent, Foucault (1982: 224) maintains that ‘power relations have become more and more under state control'. Such a development reflects what Kapferer names, I repeat, ‘the state's overarching determining potency’, which is a conception of the state as unlimited in respect to engaging and exercising power in societal fields. And it corresponds with Deleuze and Guattari's relativistic conception of ‘sovereignty’, as indicated above. Notwithstanding the differences that distinguish these scholars, they all render at least a conception of the state that transcends a restricted central-government conception; the state is, in brief, essentially vested with an omnipotent, expanding force to prevail as a superstructural or an overarching force.
The development of a strong postcolonial state in Botswana in a context where the vast majority of the population was embedded in indigenous structures of power is comprehensible if we come to terms with how the state has become an overarching force in relation to these structures. I am therefore centrally concerned with how the networks of power vested in indigenous hierarchies have been captured into the process of postcolonial state formation in ways that have not only brought them under control but contributed significantly to the strength of the state.
This analysis requires a comprehension of the character of the major hierarchical structures – Tswana merafe – because they inhibit, as already suggested, vast communities that were caught up into their structures of domination in precolonial and especially colonial times. The persistently hegemonic character of Tswana domination is comprehensible only by an analysis of its development in preindependence times. I start therefore by explaining – again aided by the general approach explained above – how the central power in these merafe grew in strength and scale from the late eighteenth century by capturing vast communities into their structures. By the establishment of the Bechuanaland Protectorate in 1885, they were subjected to British supremacy. Yet at the same time, their capacity of capture vis-à-vis other communities under their domination was reinforced.
In the Foucauldian conception, the colonial state – extensively practising ‘indirect rule’ – prevailed as superstructural to a whole range of power networks in which Tswana rulers of each of the merafe in precolonial times continued being at the apex of a hierarchy of power relations. Under British supremacy Tswana rulers lost their full sovereignty, yet were at the same time empowered by the British to transform, expand and achieve control over vast communities in the extensive, bounded territories assigned to them by the colonial power. When the British withdrew – just as peacefully as they had arrived – the indigenous hierarchies of authority, which had expanded and been reinforced under colonial conditions, were captured by the process of modern state formation in ways that again involved substantial transformations of these hierarchies.
And more than that: the state, following Foucault (1980: 122), ‘consists in the codification of a whole number of power relations which render its functioning possible'. This is a notion of an intervening state that he also describes as ‘a very sophisticated structure, in which individuals can be integrated, under one condition: that this individuality would be shaped in a new form, and submitted to a set of very specific patterns’ (Foucault 1982: 214). This notion of the state as intervening in the population is
