Botswana

From the rock art of the Kalahari to a diamond democracy

Botswana's story begins with the San (Basarwa), among the world's oldest continuous hunter-gatherer societies, whose ancestors left tens of thousands of paintings at the Tsodilo Hills. Cattle-keeping Bantu-speaking Tswana chiefdoms later organised the eastern hardveld into powerful merafe (nations) ruled by dikgosi. Hemmed in by the upheavals of the difaqane, by Boer expansion from the Transvaal and by the Ndebele, the Tswana drew on missionary contact and, in 1895, on a celebrated appeal by three kings to keep their land out of Cecil Rhodes's company. Britain declared the Bechuanaland Protectorate in 1885 but governed it from Mafeking, outside its borders, and largely neglected it. At independence on 30 September 1966 the country was one of the poorest on earth; the 1967 discovery of diamonds at Orapa, prudently managed under a stable multiparty democracy, transformed it into one of Africa's notable development successes.