Le phénomène “Krouman” à Sassandra: la marque d’une institution séculaire

A recurrent anxiety in contemporary Botswana is the perception of an immediate threat from external forces: strangers, livestock, and disease. How do the state and its citizens react under these conditions? The following article explores this question in the context of globalization, discourses of autochthony, and the blood-based politics of population management in Botswana. In recent years, Batswana increasingly see themselves as a nation under siege from foreigners, and in particular, newly arrived migrants from Zimbabwe. Under pressure from outside, Botswana citizens fear the loss of their physical homeland and the denigration of their collective identity and sense of morality. Through a reading of publications in the print media, I examine the articulation of the rhetoric of invasion and national paranoia that has taken root in Botswana. Although the presumption of assault by outsiders is said to threaten the existence of the Batswana nation through the erosion of the supposedly distinct boundaries between citizen and stranger, these apprehensions also carry a potent creative potential. I argue that, in an environment of economic uncertainty and ethnic instability, the specter of the stranger/Zimbabwean is used to reconfigure the content and emphasis of citizenship in Botswana.     

Un aspect de l'insertion des militaries dans le processus de développement national en Afrique: Étude de quelques contradictions

At independence, Botswana, like many other countries in Anglophone Africa, inherited a dual legal system that was undergoing a significant shift towards convergence in the areas of criminal law and procedure. In Botswana's case, convergence was driven by a desire to minimise or, more speculatively, to gradually eliminate the gap between the normative standards of common law/general and customary courts in criminal trials. The country chose to follow a route that involved the universalisation of a penal code based on English common law, and the partial standardisation of procedure rules for customary courts. The present article considers how codified law and written procedure rules have transformed the substance and classification of legal wrongs, disputes and dispute processes, as well as the context and meaning of punishment in traditional settings.