ABSTRACT
While investigating the community of Ghanaian migrants in present-day Gaborone, the capital of Botswana, some Ghanaian businesswomen told me revealing stories of how they were encouraged if not pushed to become entrepreneurs on the local market.2 Take for instance the entrepreneurial history of Mrs. Asante3 who arrived in Botswana from Sunyani, Brong Ahafo region in Ghana, in 2000 at the age of 34. She came with her husband who had been recruited by the Botswana government to work as a civil servant.4 In Ghana she had been a self-employed hairdresser running a hair salon with her sister in the country’s second largest city, Kumasi.5 She lamented that the position of dependence that her migration to Botswana had produced increasingly felt “not right”, perhaps even shameful. In her new-found situation in Gaborone, a place she did not know, in a context where she did not speak the local language and where she initially did not know anybody, a Ghanaian fellow businesswoman she became friends with told her not to sit “idle”. Initiative had to be taken, plans were to be made. She intimated how she spoke to her husband about it, as he was willing to provide her with some “seed money”, i.e., some capital from his own savings which she could use to begin “something”. Yet more was required and she decided to turn to the network of Ghanaian businesswomen in the city, particularly those who owned hair and beauty salons. Here she was told that she could come and work for a limited period of time and offer her hairdressing skills. She worked for a Ghanaian owner in Tlokweng, a suburb of Gaborone, and was told that the money earned should be used to put her on her “own feet”; i.e., emphasizing that being employed in this way as a hairdresser in one of these salons was in fact not befi tting her status and should only serve to “get her going”.
