Link Banana

I recently heard — I wish I remembered where — Bill Clinton make the point that a moratorium on the use of the word “Africa” would likely make people see the continent as a little less bleak. While there are still big problems in places like Somolia, Chad, Sudan, and the DRC, there are a number of good and improving governments and economies.

The Ibrahim Index, a quantification of a sub-Saharan government’s quality, highlights the differences. While the aforementioned contries have the lowest scores, places you rarely hear about — Mauritius, Seychelles, Cape Verde, Botswana, Namibia — are relatively well run. (South Africa’s pretty good too, but we constantly hear about it.)

(via Passport)

Because I’m on a segue kick, Marian Tupy recently offered a comparison of Zimbabwe and Botswana. Though the comparison’s slightly insane — anything looks well-run when compared to a basketcase — it’s an interesting perspective on a country I rarely hear about. Some history of Botswana:

Botswana, previously the Protectorate of Bechuanaland, gained independence from Great Britain in 1966. Her new president, Seretse Khama, a descendant of the local Bamangwato chiefs, received his education at South Africa’s Fort Hare University and Oxford’s Balliol College. In 1948, he married a white woman, Ruth Williams, who clerked at Lloyds in London. Their marriage was political dynamite that was, at first, opposed by both the traditional chiefs in the Bechuanaland and by the government in South Africa, Botswana’s immensely more powerful southern neighbor whose white population had just elected a regime that wanted to increase racial segregation between whites and blacks. Fearing South Africa’s negative reaction, the British government banned the Khamas from the Protectorate for almost a decade.

The racial prejudice that the pair encountered from both sides of the racial spectrum proved to be formative. While most regimes in post-independence Africa sent their white populations packing, Khama and his successors strove for racial harmony. As a result, Botswana benefited greatly from the human and financial capital of her large white community, which totals 7 percent of the overall population. It is surely a sign of Botswana’s relative comfort with racial diversity that on April 1, 2008, Ian Khama, the first-born son of the country’s founder, took over the reigns of power in Botswana, thus becoming the first half-white leader of an African democracy.

Your disturbing statistic of the day comes care of Passport, who points out that the amount Americans spend on health care for their pets is roughly the same as the GDPs of Botswana or Bahrain.