I’ve been here in Botswana for 6 days now and I have experienced way more than I have words for right now. On my first day i’ve seen the parliament of Botswana, i’ve learned a lot about the culture of the Kgotlas and Setswana tribal culture. All of that before I even saw the place where I would stay for the next four days. Coming out of a night with little sleep on the plane, that was a lot to take in. The organizers of the Global Forum on Modern Direct Democracy did a great job of putting together the pre-conference tour, which gave me initial insights into where I am right now.
The conference itself would fill a whole article, which I will come to eventually. However the purpose of this entry serves to get my thoughts in order and things off my chest that I have been struggling with over the past days. During the conference I made the decision to stay right at the conference center which definitely was at the high end of Hotels in the area and the four days would cost me easily half of an average Setswana monthly income. Even though I made a concious and well informed decision to stay right at the venue – which has been crucial for my regeneration after coming from four weeks of travelling around germany with the OMNIBUS – it created an uncomfortable background noise that I couldn’t, and wouldn’t want to shake. At the time I didn’t know the scales to make a comparison, which honestly wouldn’t have changed how I decided. It’s been a valuable experience to put myself into perspective and change venue as soon as the conference was over. During the conference I met an incredibly intelligent and upright student from Gaborone who I became friends with in an instant. She helps me a lot to navigate here and gives me a lot of valuable information that I have been ignorantly unaware of. Since I came here with many people from Europe, but really from all over the world, I became uncomfortably aware of little microagressions towards the people of Botswana coming from some of us. Keep in mind that we have been meeting with government and university officials as well as students that mayor in prestigeuos subjects. The amount of repetitions of single comments on how impressively intelligent the students here are, coming from some individuals was nerveracking. What looks like – and is probably also meant as – a compliment still reveals the underlying assumption of inferiority. I’m not stressing this to put someone on the spot or to judge but because now that I have witnessed it, I want to talk about underlying principles of the human psyche. I want to talk about the struggle that can be experienced just through looking different from most of the people surrounding oneself. I’ve always felt like looks don’t matter, and to me that remains the way I navigate through the world – at least I’d like to think of it that way. But being confronted with how I am perceived in a mostly black country like Botswana, but also Haiti – where I spent 10 Days last winter – I have to recognize that it makes me feel uncomfortable at times. Fully aware of the fact that there’s a major difference between the preassumptions that are made towards how I am perceived as a white man in a black environment, and how a black woman is perceived in a white environment. Where I am openly welcomed and met with curiosity, millions are met with distrust volatile prejudice and rational assumptions of inferiority. Where I am included more than I can tolerate, millions are excluded more than can be tolerated. In every place I have been so far, I have been met with the hopes and dreams of many people looking at germany which I felt hurtingly unable to contribute to. What happens on the personal level, fully reflects the way trade and government deals are done until this day. But just as I had to and still learn gratitude and human kindness Europe has to grow up and Germany as a country can contribute to that. I think it wouldn’t really require much physically but only the hardest thing emotionally. To make a mense!!!
Money or know how or whatever is given to “support” African countries of which there is 55 (yes I am counting the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic) – which to this day have to live within randomly drawn borders that don’t take the origins of the different cultures into account – can’t really break the cycle of perceived racist hierarchy. I think it does make THE difference HOW we do things. The exact same amount of money can do great good and great harm. To give calculatedly, focusing on the own benefits seems to be the toxic trait of Western Civilisation and therefore capitalism. I feel like to this day the West does a terrible Job when it comes to take a ruling interest in underlying cultural principles. We (the west) have an incredibly hard time to confront ourselves with the fact that other cultures tend to have and had even more capabilities that were rooted so deeply in the surroundings they found, that if we had to try and live how the culture we found would suggest, we would have to accept our inferiority to that way of living. Have you ever caught a fish with a metal speer by just holding your breath? Have you ever tracked the traces of a Gazelle, or caught one?
By asking these questions it already becomes clear that a majority still looks at Africa like the beautiful wild continent they’re merely interested in, to do a Safari in or dine in predominantly white owned restaurants for a better price than at home, making sure to steer clear of the suburbs. Most of the so-called help organizations pose as a new form of marginalizing people and forcing things on them they didn’t ask for. I know it to be true even and especially for UN-level help programmes that often enough fail to learn what is needed. And by that I mean what the people that the UN-programmes claim to be helping actually think is needed. Often this kind of help is misled it imposes agenda rather than supporting self developement. Not to speak of modern day influencers that feel the need to broadcast poverty and malnourishment of indigenous tribes rather than the cultural wealth they necessarily must have seen as well. Maybe it would be less of a Problem that wasn’t the only thing thats widely broadcasted around Europe, still here the “Help” is destined to support dependency not independence. Now it would be widely inaccurate to narrow that kind of behaviour down to the African Continent. Its true for the most touristic activities and infrastructure around the world. It most often and certainly comes with ignorance. It comes with foodpreferences and a colony of “memories” frozen into pictures. It comes with a taste of open air Zoo, if you know that only 5% of the worlds population has ever seen the inside of an airplane. The traveler that’s actually interested to understand and be in genuine exchange with the people living their everyday life is just as much a minority as the company that’s interested in their core purpose, which is to generate equally common wealth for every party involved. Business in bad faith needs to be seen as theft, the hundreth fridgemagnet as an offense.
To give an example, every year several cruiseships dock in a small haitian bay not far from Cap-Haitien. A whole area with waterslides the clearest sea and fresh drinks is reserved only for guests of the cruises. Even when the cruise season is over the area remains closed for haitian residents. These Cruiseships will not even tell their customers that they’re currently in Haiti. It’ll be phrased “a small caribbean island”. Where one could argue that the case of Haiti is merely to make passengers feel secure because of everything thats going on there, the outcome still stays the same. On a profound level we only hear news from there, when its bad. The european narrative focuses on the bad to support the claim that “these people” urgently need our help with UN-armed forces who are not well received by the haitian population. In Haiti we also met heavily racist white southafrican – we also met southafricans with different ethnic origins which had to take a lot of that racism – mercenaries operating the air traffic in Haiti. Again one could argue – which they did – that they were the only ones willing to do it. I’d like to know which companies were asked. It seems convenient to send a group of people with inherited deeply white supremacist views to operate a country like Haiti since the risk of one of them voicing something contradictory to the narrative or even positive about haitian development is close to zero. Coming from a country that to this day has white only and black only beaches.
As fate wants it I find myself in Gaborone just a few kilometers from the southafrican border where people have rich stories about crime and racism in South-Africa. Botswanas first president was married to a british woman. That wedding alone was a threat to the just upcoming – in the 60s – concept of segregation in South-Africa. Ever since Botswana has a very different and way more confident approach to the whole topic and diluted it down very ealry on. Just Today at the next table from us sat an all white group of South-Africans talking about those exact two beaches, which my friend just told me about a day earlier. I could see, and hear, how uncomfortable that made her. She told me for her, people like that are not welcome in Botswana. If I had a say in the matter I’d agree 100%, but I don’t, after all I’m not Setswana. The official reason for the segregated beaches was the claim of the white Cape-Town population that the N*-word would litter the beach with trash. The consequence hasn’t been better clean up systems or littering restrictions but the full blown inhumane ban of black people from that particular beach. My friend was there and she found that both beaches were trashed. The littering situation hasn’t changed, but the social situation worsened.
Theres many different levels of that structural racism and many fadenscheinige arguments to make it seem like its about nothing else but what capitalism dictates, many rationalisations on how these events shouldn’t be understood as racist. The intentions however, weather true or false, are highly irrelevant to the story. The only valid measurment should alway be the effects of the outcome.
For South-Africas case one must say that the “what is done” still is relevant but for more subtle cases we mostly have to change our behaviour on the “Why is it done?” and “how is it done”. There is an easy fix for a littering Problem on Cape-Towns beaches and an even easier fix on the waterslidepark on a small carribean country in Haiti.
I can firmly hear someone say: “well it’s just how capitalism is working. Also, we’re always trading to get the best deal for ourselves and everybody does it, so we’re treating them equal to us.” As someone that has seen and wholeheartedly dove into cultures of different countries in four continents it is clear to me that
A: The underlying assumption of “everyone is doing it” doesn’t speak for cultural behaviour, but merely for people bending over and restricitng themselves to fit a lethal, involuntary, capitalist system that isn’t in the blood of most cultures.
B: This western concept recently reveals more and more, how leathel and untrustworthy the West treated itself and others. The decline of everything cannot be understood without a clear assessment, that brings the way we work and live and suffer and love, into direct correlation with the capitalist system. Depression, suicide, rape, assault and war directly coems from the way we trade, comes from what we learn, in business-schools and engineering, in IT and health-care-reality. The only miracle is that we endured it as long as we did. So bad faith capitalism isn’t even working for rich countries and societies if we look at the indicators of lifeworth and perceived quality of life, rather than GDP – these days even the GDP shows it.
C: A capitalism-idealist would tell you that what we’re living, in isn’t even capitalism as it was intended. It was and is, just as misused as communism, authoritarianism, oligarchism, democratism, monarchy, parliamentarism, leftism, rightism, catholicism, islamism fundamentalism and zionism.
Let’s work on losing the -isms and grow towards reality. Let’s build the capacity to see what is there and act on it. Let’s stop to see the world as we want to see it, because we don’t want to change our own behaviour.
(Will work in some sources for you along the way.)