Chapter 01 · c. 70,000 BCE – c. 500 CE
Hunters, Herders and the Painted Hills
The San leave one of humanity's oldest artistic records in the Tsodilo Hills before herders and the first farmers arrive.
Long before any state, the land that is now Botswana belonged to the San, known in the country as the Basarwa: mobile hunter-gatherer bands whose ancestors have lived across southern Africa and the Kalahari for tens of thousands of years. Their intimate knowledge of a semi-arid land of sandveld, pans and seasonal water shaped a way of life that endured, in places, into modern times, even as the San became a marginalised minority.
Their deepest mark is at the Tsodilo Hills in the north-west, four quartzite hills rising from the Kalahari sand that the San regard as a sacred place and, in tradition, the birthplace of all life. Inscribed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 2001, Tsodilo holds more than 4,500 rock paintings across hundreds of sites in a small area, earning it the name 'the Louvre of the Desert'; some images have been dated to roughly 24,000 years before present and occupation of the hills reaches back tens of thousands of years.
From around two thousand years ago the human landscape changed as peoples bringing cattle, sheep and pottery moved into the region. Khoe-speaking herders and, in time, Bantu-speaking farmers settled the better-watered east. At Tsodilo the painted record reflects this layering: fine San images of game alongside later finger-paintings, including depictions of cattle, made by herding and farming newcomers. This long overlay of hunter, herder and cultivator set the human foundations of the country.
“Often called 'the Louvre of the Desert', Tsodilo holds more than 4,500 rock paintings in one of the world's highest concentrations of rock art.”
— On the Tsodilo Hills World Heritage Site
Turning points
- c. 24,000 BPCulture & Ideas
- c. 2,000 years agoPeoples & Migration
Herders and farmers arrive
Peoples bringing cattle, sheep and pottery move into present-day Botswana, beginning the long shift from hunter-gathering toward herding and farming societies.
See the data - c. 200 CEPeoples & Migration
Early Bantu settlement
Bantu-speaking settlers, among them the ancestors of the Kalanga, establish farming and cattle-keeping communities in the eastern part of the region.
See the data
Chapter sources: Tsodilo (World Heritage List), Tsodilo, Tsodilo Hills, Botswana — African Rock Art, History of Botswana, Botswana — History
Chapter 02 · c. 1700 – 1840
The Tswana Nations and the Difaqane
Cattle-keeping Tswana merafe consolidate on the eastern hardveld, then are convulsed by the difaqane and Ndebele raids.
By the eighteenth century the Tswana (Batswana), Sotho-Tswana Bantu-speakers, had built a distinctive society on the eastern margin of the Kalahari. They organised into merafe (nations or chiefdoms) such as the Bangwaketse, Bakwena, Bangwato and Batawana, each ruled by a kgosi (chief) and grouped around large towns rather than scattered villages. Wealth and status rested on cattle, lent out through the mafisa system, while public affairs were debated in the kgotla, the chief's assembly. Age-grade regiments, the mephato, organised men for war and labour.
These were dynastic, segmenting polities: succession disputes regularly split a morafe, with a defeated faction migrating to found a new chiefdom elsewhere. The Bangwaketse emerged as the first major Tswana state in this country in the mid-eighteenth century, with the Bakwena, Bangwato and Batawana forming through later splits. Cattle, controlled by the dikgosi, underpinned both authority and the subordination of San and other client communities.
In the early nineteenth century this world was thrown into turmoil by the difaqane (the Sotho-Tswana name for the disruption known among the Nguni as the mfecane), a chain of wars, migrations and famine radiating out of the rise of the Zulu kingdom. Marauding groups crossed Tswana country; in 1826 the Bangwaketse regent Sebego rallied thousands of men and drove the Kololo from the region. Most threatening of all were the Ndebele under Mzilikazi, whose raiders harried Tswana towns through the 1830s before moving north, leaving the chiefdoms weakened and wary.
Turning points
- mid-18th centuryFormation
- early 19th centuryWar & Rupture
The difaqane convulses the region
Wars and forced migrations linked to the wider mfecane/difaqane disrupt Tswana society, bringing raiding, displacement and famine.
See the data - 1826War & Rupture
Sebego expels the Kololo
Sebego, regent of the Bangwaketse, raises some 4,000 men and permanently drives the invading Kololo out of the region.
See the data - 1830sWar & Rupture
Ndebele raids under Mzilikazi
Mzilikazi's Ndebele raid Tswana communities through the 1830s, capturing cattle, women and children before migrating north across the Limpopo.
See the data
Chapter sources: History of Botswana, Botswana — History, Matabele Wars 1836–1896, Matabeleland: The Ndebele Empire in Southern Africa, Tswana people
Chapter 03 · 1816 – 1885
Missionaries, Boers and Mounting Pressure
Christianity spreads through the chiefdoms as the Tswana are caught between Boer expansion, the Ndebele and the gun trade.
European missionaries reached the Tswana through the London Missionary Society (LMS), which arrived in the region in 1816. Robert Moffat established his celebrated station at Kuruman on the southern border and translated the Bible into Setswana, while his son-in-law David Livingstone settled among the Bakwena and founded the Kolobeng mission near Kgosi Sechele's town in 1845. Mission contact brought literacy, firearms and new ideas; some dikgosi, most famously Khama III of the Bangwato, embraced Christianity and used it to reshape their states, banning alcohol and curbing older customs.
Yet the nineteenth century left the Tswana increasingly hemmed in. To the north and east the Ndebele kingdom remained a military threat. To the south and east the Boers of the Transvaal pressed onto Tswana grazing land, raided for cattle and labour, and sought to cut the 'missionaries' road' to the interior. Tswana chiefs such as Sechele fought the Boers, and missionaries warned London that African peoples faced dispossession from the south.
By the 1880s the scramble for southern Africa made the stakes plain. Britain feared both Boer expansion and growing German activity in neighbouring South West Africa, which together threatened to close off the route north. The missionary lobby, led by John Mackenzie, pressed for imperial protection. The decisive intervention came when an imperial force was sent north to secure the road, paving the way for a formal British declaration over the country.
“Missionaries warned London that the Tswana faced dispossession by Boers encroaching from the south.”
— On the road to the 1885 protectorate
Turning points
- 1816Religion
- 1845Religion
Livingstone founds Kolobeng
David Livingstone establishes the Kolobeng mission among the Bakwena near Kgosi Sechele, his only church and the source of his single convert.
- 1852War & Rupture
Boer attack on the Bakwena
Transvaal Boers attack Sechele's Bakwena and sack Livingstone's Kolobeng mission, part of mounting pressure from the Transvaal on Tswana land.
See the data - 1875Politics & Power
Figures of the era
David Livingstone1813–1873
LMS missionary and explorer
Settled among the Bakwena and founded the Kolobeng mission in 1845; his travels from this base opened the interior to European attention.
Chapter sources: History of Botswana, Botswana — History, Khama III, Bechuanaland Protectorate
Chapter 04 · 1885 – 1965
The Bechuanaland Protectorate
Britain declares a protectorate it then neglects; three kings sail to London to keep their land out of Rhodes's company.
On 31 March 1885 Britain proclaimed the Bechuanaland Protectorate, after Sir Charles Warren led an imperial expedition north from the Cape to forestall Boer and German designs on the road to the interior. The southern portion became the Crown Colony of British Bechuanaland (later annexed to the Cape), while the territory north of the Molopo became the protectorate that would grow into Botswana. From the start Britain governed it cheaply and at arm's length, leaving the dikgosi substantial day-to-day power over their reserves.
That distance became literal: from 1895 the protectorate was administered from Mafeking, a town in the Cape Colony lying outside the territory's own borders, an arrangement that persisted until the 1960s and symbolised decades of imperial neglect of an impoverished, landlocked country valued chiefly as a corridor. Investment was minimal, a hut tax was imposed, and a railway built by Rhodes's company in the 1890s ran along the eastern edge.
The protectorate's survival owed much to a famous journey. In 1895 three kings, Khama III of the Bangwato, Sebele I of the Bakwena and Bathoen I of the Bangwaketse, sailed to Britain, supported by the London Missionary Society and temperance campaigners, to oppose a plan to hand their country to Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Company. Touring churches and towns and winning public sympathy, they met Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain and were received at Windsor by Queen Victoria. They secured a continued imperial protectorate, ceding only a strip of land for the railway, and kept their nations out of company rule, a turning point commemorated today by the Three Dikgosi Monument in Gaborone.
“The capital of the territory lay outside the territory: the protectorate was run from Mafeking, beyond its own borders.”
— On the administration of Bechuanaland
Turning points
- 31 March 1885Colonisation
Bechuanaland Protectorate declared
After Sir Charles Warren's expedition, Britain proclaims a protectorate over the territory north of the Molopo to check Boer and German expansion.
See the data - 1895Politics & Power
- 1895Colonisation
Capital moved to Mafeking
The protectorate's administration is seated at Mafeking, a town outside the territory's own borders, where it remains until the 1960s.
See the data - 1948Politics & Power
- 1950–1956Politics & Power
Figures of the era
Khama III (Khama the Good)c. 1837–1923
Kgosi of the Bangwato
Christian reformer who banned alcohol and led the 1895 mission to Britain; his statecraft helped keep the protectorate out of Rhodes's company.
Bathoen Ic. 1845–1910
Kgosi of the Bangwaketse
Mission-educated chief who, with Khama III and Sebele I, won British public and royal support in 1895 to preserve Tswana self-rule.
Chapter sources: Bechuanaland Protectorate, Botswana — History, Khama III, Bathoen I, William Charles Willoughby and the 1895 visit of the three kings, Sir Seretse Khama, Seretse Khama
Chapter 05 · 1966 – present
Independence, Diamonds and Democracy
A penniless protectorate becomes a stable democracy and, on the strength of Orapa's diamonds, a development success.
Constitutional advance came swiftly in the 1960s. Seretse Khama founded the Bechuanaland Democratic Party (later the Botswana Democratic Party, BDP) in 1962, and it won the first general election under universal suffrage in 1965. A new capital was laid out at Gaborone, and on 30 September 1966 the Bechuanaland Protectorate became the independent Republic of Botswana, with Seretse Khama as its first president. The new nation was among the poorest in the world, with a per-capita income of around US$80, only a few graduates and barely any tarred road.
Fortunes changed almost at once. In 1967 the diamond company De Beers located a vast kimberlite pipe at Orapa, which opened as a mine in 1971; further finds followed at Letlhakane and the rich Jwaneng field. Crucially, Botswana negotiated a 50-50 partnership with De Beers through the Debswana company from 1969 and channelled the revenue, under successive National Development Plans, into schools, clinics, water and roads rather than allowing it to be looted or squandered. From the mid-1960s the country recorded some of the fastest sustained growth rates in the world.
What set Botswana apart was the pairing of mineral wealth with sound institutions. The BDP governed through regular, peaceful multiparty elections, with low corruption, an independent judiciary and prudent fiscal management that avoided the 'resource curse'. After Seretse Khama's death in 1980 power passed smoothly to Quett (later Ketumile) Masire and his successors; in 2024 the long-dominant BDP itself lost power at the ballot box. Botswana, though tested by HIV/AIDS and by over-reliance on diamonds, is widely cited as one of post-colonial Africa's outstanding stories of stability and development.
“At independence Botswana was one of the poorest countries on earth; within a generation diamond revenue, prudently managed, made it one of the fastest-growing economies in the world.”
— On Botswana's transformation
Turning points
- 1965Politics & Power
- 30 September 1966Independence
Independence of Botswana
The protectorate becomes the Republic of Botswana with Seretse Khama as first president, entering nationhood as one of the world's poorest states.
See the data - 1967Economy & Trade
Diamonds discovered at Orapa
De Beers geologists locate a major diamond kimberlite pipe at Orapa, the find that would transform Botswana's economy.
See the data - 1969Economy & Trade
Debswana partnership formed
Botswana and De Beers form a 50-50 joint venture to mine diamonds, securing for the state a direct share of mineral wealth.
See the data - 1980Politics & Power
Chapter sources: History of Botswana, Sir Seretse Khama, Seretse Khama, Bechuanaland Protectorate, Orapa diamond mine, Diamonds to development: Botswana's post-independence economic growth, Botswana — The World Factbook, Botswana