A Somerset Lad

A little white pick up sat parked outside the convenience store across the road. In my memory, it was identical to that which was driven by Mma Ramotswe from BBC Television series from eight or nine years ago, The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency.  Precious Ramotswe drove her tiny white van through a country very different from England, but also a country that was very different from the rest of Africa.

In his magisterial work The State of Africa, Martin Meredith covered the five decades of African history from the time when many of the nations achieved independence in the early-1960s.

As one reads through its seven hundred pages, there is a longing for some good news, for the appearance of Botswana. There are just seven references to the country that provided the backdrop for The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency, four of those are no more than passing.

A paragraph on page 285 captures the essence of the country:

Botswana provided a rare example of an African state that used  its bonanza of mineral riches wisely. At independence in 1966, Botswana, consisting of large areas of desert, with a population of only half a million, was one of the poorest countries in Africa, heavily dependent on British support. But the discovery of rich seams of diamonds shortly after independence transformed its prospects. By 1980 its per capita income had risen to more than $900 a year. Avoiding extravagant expenditure on prestige projects, Seretse Khama invested in infrastructure, health and education and built up substantial reserves. Private businesses were allowed to grow. Corruption hardly existed. In the 1980s per capita income rose to $1,700 a year.

A hundred pages later,  on page 386, Botswana appears:

Only three countries – Senegal, the tiny state of Gambia and Botswana – sustained multi-party politics, holding elections on a regular basis that were considered reasonably free and fair. Botswana, in particular, stood out as an example of liberal democracy, tolerant of opposition, where the rule of law was held in respect and where economic development proceeded apace.

The final reference is on page 698:

Botswana stands out as a unique example of an enduring multiparty democracy with a record of sound economic management, that has used its diamond riches for national advancement and maintained an administration free of corruption.

Corruption hardly existed  . . . the rule of law was held in respect . . .sound economic management . . . riches used for national advancement. Seretse Khama might have gone the way of other African leaders, filling his own pockets and those of his friends, behaving as the leaders of many African nations still behave. Instead, he shaped an exceptional place.

Ranked 35th in the world by Transparency International, Botswana remains a less corrupt place around which to drive a white van than the likes of Italy, Greece, Poland, and Hungary.

An odd sight among the three lanes of traffic travelling the M5 motorway, a car from the Irish county of Wexford with a 2021 registration. Someone had been given the opportunity to escape from the island on which they lived and to come to one which is considerably more crowded.

The Covid restrictions have trapped people on an island. The holidaymakers who would be journeying to foreign destinations now pay premium rates for accommodation in England, pricing out those who ordinarily might have enjoyed a holiday in Devon or Cornwall. There is a greater awareness of living on an island.

Yet geographical confines do not necessarily create a feeling of insularity. Once I met a man on the island of Cape Clear off of the west coast of Cork who commented, “Only when I go to the mainland do I become aware of living on an island.”

It had seemed an unlikely assertion. Surely, living in a community of just a hundred and twenty people with everything arriving by boat, there was a daily sense of the insular? But  might he not have pointed a finger back, “don’t you live on an island? What awareness have you of being insular?”

Aren’t islands a matter of perspective?

A woman I knew in Northern Ireland came from Cumbrae in the Firth of Clyde. Blessed with a wonderful sense of humour, she would tell a story of the minister on Great Cumbrae who would stand in the kirk on the Sabbath and pray for the islands of Great and Little Cumbrae and for the offshore nations of Scotland and England.

Of course, the man in the community of ten dozen souls and the reverend gentleman offering intercession on Sunday would both have been right. Geographical insularity is the natural order of things in this small archipelago of islands off of the North-West coast of Europe.

Growing up in Somerset of the 1960s and 1970s, there would have been geography lessons reminding us how close the sea was to each of us and history lessons on the importance of the sea to the power and wealth of imperial times. Had Britain not been an island, waves of invaders would have swept through in successive centuries and the opportunity to use the sea to national advantage might never have arisen. (It is hard now to imagine how dominant Britain became, militarily and economically; in 1913 it accounted for 44% of all international investment in the world).

“Only when I go to the mainland do I become aware of living on an island,” said the man.

Maybe we all live on our own islands, though, or at least wish to do so. “I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space,” declared Shakespeare’s melancholic prince of Denmark. Perhaps the man on the island, bounded in a geographical nutshell, really had found a sense of infinite space.