Ngwato attitudes towards Zimbabwean immigrants in the Bechuanaland Protectorate in the 1950s

Abstract

This article was inspired by a book entitled Transnationalism and New African Immigration to South Africa, ~ edited by Jonathan Crush and David McDonald, which I reviewed for the European Journal o f Population, 19, 4 (2003), 439-40, and which deals with the disturbing rise of xenophobia in South Africa. My main criticism of the book was that it completely lacked a historical dimension. Later I discovered that similar studies on Botswana, particularly on illegal Zimbabwean immigrants, suffer from the same defect. 2 This article is therefore a modest sketch of the historical background to the phenomenon of xenophobia, with which policymakers in Botswana are grappling in the early twenty-first century. It is not, however, a historical treatise on xenophobia. Furthermore, it is acknowledged that scholarship on xenophobia is recent, being a post-liberation development in Southern Africa?