‘Doff white shirts, don overalls’: Urbanophobia, Rural Enterprise and the Ideal of Masculine Citizenship in Post-Colonial Botswana

Historical studies of migration have largely ascribed the configuration of masculinities in Botswana to male labour migration. This discourse is beyond dispute. As a paradigm, however, it has obscured other histories of migration and their influence on cultural ideals of masculinity, where circular migratory patterns became central to the construction of national identity. In the first decade of independence, Botswana’s national policy and popular discourse centred around shaping a nation of farmers composed of masculine, rural citizens. Men were encouraged to go back to their lands to stem the tide of migration to urban areas, where they would purportedly become indolent and therefore wallow in poverty. This article analyses anti-urban rhetoric and valorisation of the virtues of farming as evidence of how rural enterprise was central to the construction of the ideal of masculine national identity in early post-colonial Botswana between the 1960s and 1970s. The attempt to construct national identity around manhood was a deliberate mechanism to sustain the patriarchy’s control over subordinated gendered categories, such as women, poor people and young men.