Jesse Jackson Towering Voice For

“When an old man dies, a library burns to the ground,” the old African adage goes. The death on February 17 of American civil rights icon Rev. Jesse Jackson, aged 84, leaves the world bereft of a man whose life of service led to him being a living embodiment of the struggle for racial equality both in the United States as well as Southern Africa.

It was his relentless pursuit for racial equality and freedom that took him on a tour to Botswana and other Southern African states in the mid 1980s. Familiarising himself with the region, he drummed up global support against an apartheid South African system that held the region hostage-ruling South West Africa (Namibia), supporting rebel movements in Angola and Mozambique and occasionally conducting cross border raids into neighbouring states such as Botswana. Jackson’s August 1986 visit to Botswana, came at a point when the country had been in the unenviable position of having to walk a tightrope.

Having gained independence two decades earlier as one of the world’s poorest and least developed countries, and a labour reserve for South African mines, Botswana was economically dependent on goods and services from the highly industrialised apartheid neighbour, yet politically opposed to that country’s pariah white minority regime. Jackson’s flight descended upon the runway tarmac of Sir Seretse Khama International Airport, according to a Los Angeles Times report of the time, ‘trailed by a crowd of reporters eager to tell people back home about the plight of Southern Africa,’ he immediately felt home. He shook the hands of the welcoming party lined up, Minister of External Affairs, Dr Gaositwe Chiepe, her permanent secretary, Mr Samuel Mphuchane, Gaborone North Member of Parliament, Mr Maitshwarelo Dabutha, Gaborone mayor, Mr Paul Rantao as well as the Nigerian high commissioner, Mr Rufus Omotonye.

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“We come here, most of us as African Americans, we are American citizens with African heritage,” Rev. Jackson told BOPA upon arrival, cited in the Daily News of Tuesday August 19, 1986. Critical of the foreign policy approach of the then US president Ronald Reagan and his assistant secretary of State for African Affairs, Chester Crocker, Rev.

Jackson lamented that the US approached European nations with an aura of mutual respect, while regrettably still viewing Africa with a prism of neo-imperialism. “We must as we do in Europe, respect African nations. The commitments we made to our allies in Europe we must make to Southern Africa, a new American policy on Africa that would gain us favour with God and the world,” Rev.

Jackson said at the time. During the visit, Rev. Jackson met Botswana’s second president Sir Ketumile Masire and Minister Chiepe for talks, addressed a public lecture at the University of Botswana, held a service with fellow Christians and clergymen at the Catholic Christ the King Cathedral in Gaborone, and also got to visit the border and no man’s land between Botswana and South Africa.

At the time, Rev. Jackson paid tribute to Batswana as a unique nation that has remained principled while living ‘in the belly of the beast’. Appreciating Botswana’s difficult circumstances, he pledged US$10,000, then equivalent to P20,000, as a grant from his Rainbow Coalition to the country as humanitarian aid.

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