Michael Main - Botswana - Culture Smart!: The Essential Guide to Customs & Culture

MIKE MAIN is a businessman and management consultant specializing in leadership, team building, and presentation skills. Born in Devon, England, he has lived in West, East, Central, and Southern Africa for most of his life and is now, after twenty-five years there, a citizen of Botswana. In addition to his professional career, he is known as a photographer and a safari guide. He has also written a number of books on southern Africa and lectured extensively, both regionally and on cruise liners. He is a committee member of Transparency International and The Botswana Society, and Chairman of the Maru-a-Pula School Council and the Gaborone Music Society.

Landlocked Botswana is a country of contrasts. More than 80 percent is referred to as a desertthe Kalahari Desertyet it is not a desert at all. Despite the endless distances of thorn tree and scrub, the red sand of the Kalahari contains substantial woodland and other vegetation, and conceals boundless wealth in the form of coal, methane, copper, and diamonds: Botswana is the worlds biggest producer of gemstones.

There are no rivers, and no lakesyet there is the Okavango Delta, said to be the largest inland river delta in the world.

In a world where one measure of national wealth is the time for which a country can afford foreign imports out of reserves (usually two to three months), Botswanas time is measured in years. It is also true that the gap between rich and poor is growing ever wider, so the visitor will encounter obvious examples of both wealth and poverty: expensive cars and big houses, excellent roads and modern buildings, yet high unemployment and rural villages with dwellings built traditionally, of natural materials, without sanitation, electricity, or water.

Culturally, the people are overwhelmingly Bantu, but they are by no means a homogeneous group, except by classification in the broadest ethnic terms. In Botswana there are more than twenty tribes and twenty different, though sometimes related, languages. At independence in 1966, Botswana was one of the poorest countries in the world; it was also one of the most traditional and conservative. In the years since independence the country and its economy have made extraordinary strides, and Botswana is rightly seen as a model of democratic, planned development. But, for all that, traditional values lie close to the surface, often barely concealed beneath a veneer of modernity. This serves to explain the range of responses and behavior that a visitor might encounter. Many older people are intensely conservative in outlook, while the educated young seem indistinguishable from their peers around the world: enthusiastic, bright, innovative, and utterly modern. All are kindly, welcoming and, above all, forgiving.

Culture Smart! Botswana introduces you to the lives of the people. It looks at the history that has shaped society and shows the importance of traditional customs and values. It describes how Batswana live, work, and play, and how to avoid the pitfalls of cultural misunderstanding.