Small Man Politics and the Rule of Law: Centre-Periphery Relations in East-Central Botswana

There is a familiar stereotype overrunning much of the anthropological literature on political and economic development in new nations. Brokers and big men have captured the stage, and their chains and alliances, their manipulations and calculations, their political games as men in the middle of centre-periphery relations have loomed larger than life in the literature. Indeed, it has come to be almost a matter of faith in certain studies of new African nations, especially studies influenced by work on India, to regard political questions within the frame of a patronage model, since it has been taken for granted that transactions between patrons and clients or “friends of friends” control the stuff of politics, the decisions about who gets what, when and how. How and why the rule of law is upheld during those periods of major change in government that come immediately before and after Independence remains a largely neglected question. Yet in a new nation citizens may also take political action through appeals to ministers, courts, tribunals, or commissions of enquiry and thus subject decisions by the local government to review and sometimes revision by the central government. The outcome need not be a foregone conclusion, because the hearings may pit the interests of the central and the local government against each other. The central government may then have to defend the aggrieved citizen against the local elected officials or civil servants. The point is not that a citizenship model has to be put in the place of the old patronage model. Rather the power of citizens in a new nation qua citizens has to be taken as problematic, and their powerlessness without middlemen or brokers cannot be assumed, especially in centre-periphery relations.