The most impressive person I met in Botswana barely said a word.
She was an older woman, small in stature. We were sitting next to each other at a table during lunch at a conference about Botswana’s economic model. In a quiet voice, she told me that she was a former government minister. We talked briefly about the conference, neither of us saying anything particularly memorable. Then we were both drawn away by other conversations.
I learned later that Gaositwe Chiepe was the first woman to serve as a government minister in Botswana, the large but sparsely populated country just to the north of South Africa and sandwiched between Namibia and Zimbabwe. Chiepe had served in a number of capacities, including foreign minister, over five decades of civil service. Now retired and in her late 80s, she was still attending public functions. She'd come not as a speaker, but only to listen, and she had no glitzy entourage.
Later, when I was trying to figure out why Botswana was an African success story, I realized that I'd already encountered the answer—in the person of Gaositwe Chiepe.
