4. Juggling Lessons

For those of us seeking our fortune in Southern Africa, 1985 was the mother of all roller coasters.

Despite international condemnation and mounting internal resistance, the South African government under the Nationalist Party not only stubbornly maintained its policy of apartheid, but was enforcing it ever more brutally.

Without some form of political settlement, the country was heading inexorably towards civil war with unimaginable consequences for Southern Africa as a whole.

Early in the year, rumors fueled an emerging sense of optimism that South Africa may at last be coming to its senses.

The nationalists, it was said, may be considering a less intransigent approach to its dealings with the ANC, the primary political organization fighting against apartheid, and which included the imprisoned Nelson Mandela as one of its leaders.

With Armageddon as the alternative, those of us who had committed ourselves to the broader region grabbed eagerly at any straws of hope on offer.

Our destiny must have been smiling gleefully.

Simply to exist, Botswana needed a functional trading relationship with South Africa and had long declared that while opposed to apartheid, it would not allow ANC members to use the country as a base from which to plan or carry out acts of violence in South Africa.

Notwithstanding, in mid-1985, and completely out of the blue, the South African military sent several vehicles with armed men across the Botswana border for an over-night-time raid in Gaborone on the pretext that it had a right to preempt attacks by those they had decreed to be enemies of their government.

Several houses were targeted, with the occupants killed or injured, and I happen to know from firsthand information that not one of these houses was at the time used by active ANC personnel.

Either the original South African intelligence had been incorrect, or the raiders simply went to the wrong addresses.

More worrying, however, and I gleaned this later from an impeccable source, South Africa's Minister of Foreign Affairs had been given neither prior knowledge nor say in the raid.

The famously pugnacious Prime Minister, P. W. Botha, had bypassed his own foreign minister in giving direct instructions to the military to carry out an armed incursion into a non-hostile neighbouring state.

Apart from the demonstration of crass incompetence, if South Africa were going to maintain botched military incursions into a neighboring state that posed no threat, then where the hell were we all headed? So much for those earlier rumors.

The legacy of this raid would last for months in the form of martial law in Botswana.

Military checkpoints sprang up on all main roads, manned by armed soldiers with an intimidating attitude, and served as a constant reminder of the degree of tension that prevailed in the whole region.

So after our expectations were raised at the start of the year, we in Botswana were back languishing in a gloomy pit of despair.