ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the cosmopolitan ethnicity in Reasonable Radicals and Citizenship in Botswana. Richard Ngwabe Mannathoko belonged to an inner circle, mainly Kalanga and drawn from the first postcolonial generation of top echelon civil servants who built up Botswana’s interlocking big-business directorates. Richard Ngwabe Mannathoko died aged 79, and was buried early in December 2005 in his home city, Francistown. Mannathoko, like Joe Appiah, exemplifies the rooted public cosmopolitan who was something of a maverick. Richard Mannathoko himself belonged to an inner circle, mainly Kalanga and drawn from the first postcolonial generation of top echelon civil servants who built up Botswana’s interlocking big-business directorates. So too in Mannathoko’s funeral: a partial measure of the public man was made visible in each of two programmes, one for the requiem mass on 9 December at St James’s parish church, ending with the ‘Profile of a Gifted Son of Botswana’, and the other programme, for 10 December, the day of his burial.
