People & Culture

Botswana's human story is among the longest anywhere on Africa's map. The Tsodilo Hills in the northwest, quartzite outcrops rising from the Kalahari sand, show occupation stretching back around 100,000 years, and the roughly 400 rock art sites and more than 4,000 paintings scattered across their slopes have earned the hills the nickname the Louvre of the Desert and UNESCO World Heritage status since 2001. San and Khoe peoples are the region's oldest known inhabitants, and while some Tsodilo paintings are attributed to San hands, researchers believe most were made by Khoe people and by Bantu-speaking Hambukushu arrivals roughly 1,800 years ago. Nobody can fix an exact age for the art, since estimates for the earliest work run from 10,000 to 20,000 years, other panels may be only a century old, and much of what visitors see today may have been painted within the last two thousand years. Bantu-speaking farmers and herders moved into the region over subsequent centuries, and by the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries Tswana-speaking peoples, a branch of the wider Sotho-Tswana family, had settled much of what is now eastern and central Botswana. Splits through the eighteenth century produced the merafe, or chiefdoms, that still shape the country's map and politics: the Bangwato, by far the largest, centred on Serowe; the Bakwena in the central east; the Bangwaketse in the south; the Bakgatla along the eastern corridor; and the Batawana, an offshoot of the Bangwato, centred on Maun and the Okavango. Each morafe was led by a kgosi and governed through the kgotla, an open-air assembly where the chief and his advisers sat facing the gathered community, disputes were argued out loud, no one interrupted a speaker, and decisions were reached by consensus rather than by vote or decree. The kgotla predates colonial rule and survived every later political change to remain, today, the forum handling most of the country's criminal and civil cases at village level. That stability was tested hard in the early nineteenth century. The Difaqane, an era of upheaval set off further south and known in Zulu as the Mfecane, sent waves of displaced groups and raiding armies across the subcontinent between roughly 1815 and 1840. Mzilikazi's Ndebele, breaking from Shaka's Zulu kingdom, swept through Tswana territory seizing cattle and scattering settlements, so that many communities retreated into the hardveld to protect their herds. The Bangwaketse under Sebego raised a force of roughly 4,000 men and drove out Kololo invaders in 1826. Within a generation the merafe had regrouped, rebuilt their capitals and reasserted authority, a resilience later historians cite as evidence that Tswana institutions were already durable before any European administrator arrived. European contact came through mission stations rather than settlers. David Livingstone, son-in-law of Robert Moffat, established the Kolobeng Mission among the Bakwena in 1847, the first Christian church built within the confines of what is now Botswana, and there he converted the Bakwena chief Sechele I while teaching irrigation methods drawn from the nearby river. Among the Bangwato further north, Khama III took a different route to the same faith, embracing Christianity with a wholeheartedness that set him apart from chiefs who kept missionaries at arm's length, and used his position to build ties with the London Missionary Society and to modernise his chiefdom's affairs. Colonial rule arrived in 1885, when Britain declared the Bechuanaland Protectorate, and for its first years British involvement amounted to little more than a border police force while Tswana rulers kept day-to-day power. That changed in 1891, when London handed administration to the High Commissioner for South Africa, ending the territory's de facto self-rule. The bigger threat came from Cecil Rhodes, who wanted Bechuanaland folded into his British South Africa Company as a corridor north. In 1895 three dikgosi, Khama III, Sebele I and Bathoen I, sailed to Britain to stop it. Outmatched militarily and knowing it, they toured the country with London Missionary Society backing, worked British public opinion, and won an audience with the colonial secretary, Joseph Chamberlain. They got what they came for, and the Protectorate stayed under direct Crown administration rather than passing to Rhodes's company, keeping its territory intact and out of the settler-colony pattern that reshaped Rhodesia. It came at the price of neglect rather than exploitation, since the Colonial Office regarded the Protectorate as a temporary holding expected eventually to pass to Rhodesia or South Africa, and kept investment to a minimum for decades. The administrative capital sat at Mafeking, inside South Africa and outside the Protectorate's own borders, from 1895 until 1964, so the territory Britain governed was run, for most of its colonial life, from a town it did not own. Personal history intruded on that arrangement in 1948, when Seretse Khama, the Bangwato heir, married Ruth Williams, a white Englishwoman, at a London registry office. South Africa's apartheid government, consolidating racial segregation just across the border, reacted with open hostility, and pressure from Pretoria pushed Britain into forcing the couple into exile from 1950. They lived in England until 1956, when the Bangwato people's own appeal to Queen Elizabeth II helped secure their return. Seretse Khama went on to lead the country to independence on 30 September 1966 as its first president, with Ruth as first lady. Independence found Botswana among the poorest states on earth, with roughly twelve kilometres of paved road in the entire territory, a handful of citizens holding university degrees, and annual income per person of around seventy United States dollars. What followed was one of the sharpest reversals in postwar economic history. In 1967, the year after independence, De Beers geologists found a major kimberlite pipe at Orapa, and in 1977 an even richer field turned up at Jwaneng, one of the most valuable diamond mines on the planet. Rather than licensing the finds away, Khama's government negotiated a partnership, Debswana, with the state's equity stake and share of profits rising over successive renegotiations to an even fifty percent of the venture. That structure, and the decision to vest mineral rights in the nation rather than in whichever chiefdom sat on the deposit, channelled diamond revenue into roads, schools and administration nationwide, and the economy grew at roughly thirteen percent a year through the following two decades, eventually reaching upper-middle-income status. The same mineral wealth sat behind one of the country's hardest domestic disputes. In 1986 the government decided to relocate residents of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, on the stated grounds that clustering people outside made services cheaper to deliver and that settlement inside was incompatible with conservation and tourism. San applicants, Survival International and other advocates argued that the real driver was land clearance ahead of mining, pointing to a statement in 2000 by Botswana's minister of minerals that relocation was meant to pave the way for a proposed diamond mine at Gope. Evictions proceeded through 1997, 2002 and 2005, and former residents sued in what became the longest court case in the country's history. On 13 December 2006 the High Court ruled by a two to one majority that refusing San residents entry to the reserve without a permit, and refusing them hunting licences, was unlawful and unconstitutional, and granted 189 of the 243 applicants the right to return. None of that history sits behind glass. Tsodilo's painted panels still face out over the same dunes the artists stood on, and its custodial communities remain in the surrounding villages. The Okavango, fed not by local rain but by water falling on the Angolan highlands months earlier and travelling roughly four months over a thousand kilometres south, still floods every year, peaking between June and August and more than tripling its dry-season footprint as it draws wildlife from the surrounding Kalahari. The Makgadikgadi pans, salt flats left when a lake larger than Switzerland finally dried out several thousand years ago, still hold the stone tools of the people who lived on its shore. Chobe's elephants still cross its floodplain in the tens of thousands. The Khama Rhino Sanctuary at Serowe, conceived by residents in 1989 and formalised as a trust in 1992 on land the Ngwato Land Board allocated the following year, still runs as a community project rather than as a state park. Kolobeng's mission ruins still stand outside Gaborone, village kgotlas still meet under their shade trees, and Gaborone itself, laid out from scratch from 1964 on garden-city principles and functioning as capital within two years, still carries the marks of a state built at speed on diamond money it did not yet have when the plans were drawn. Standing in front of any of this changes how a visitor should behave. If invited into a kgotla, sit where you are directed and never interrupt a speaker, since the assembly runs on turn-taking and consensus and silence until addressed is the right posture. Greet with dumela, adding rra for a man or mma for a woman, and an elder may offer a three-part handshake with a wrist grasp included, which is worth letting them lead. Photographing people, and especially children, calls for asking first every time, in rural areas as much as in Gaborone. Community-based San tourism in the Kalahari works best through operators who partner directly with the community rather than treating a visit as a performance, and the same rule about asking before photographing applies there with particular weight. Self-drive travel into the delta or the pans wants a genuine four-wheel drive and a driver willing to assess a water crossing on foot rather than push through it blind, the Makgadikgadi's soft mud pans are best avoided in the wet season from December to April, and both regions sit in malarial zones worth medicating against beforehand.