The history of Botswana

Botswana, a landlocked country of the Kalahari in southern Africa, was home to San hunter-gatherers for tens of thousands of years before Bantu-speaking farmers and herders arrived in the first millennium CE. From the sixteenth century the Tswana peoples formed a series of cattle-keeping chiefdoms, which survived the wars of the early nineteenth century and in 1885 chose British protection as the Bechuanaland Protectorate to avoid being absorbed by Boer, German or company rule. Britain governed lightly and neglected the territory, which was one of the poorest in the world at independence in 1966. The discovery of diamonds and stable government under Seretse Khama and his successors made Botswana one of Africa's fastest-growing economies and one of its longest-running multiparty democracies.

People have lived in what is now Botswana since the Early Stone Age, when the region was wetter and the great lake of Makgadikgadi, now a salt pan, covered much of the north. The ancestors of the San and Khoe, often grouped as Khoisan, were living there by at least 30,000 to 40,000 years ago. They hunted and gathered across the region in small bands of related families, following water and game, and left thousands of paintings in the Tsodilo Hills in the north-west, a sacred site still revered by the San, whose rock art spans many thousands of years. Their deep knowledge of the Kalahari, its plants, animals and water sources, allowed them to live in country that others found impossible.

About 2,000 years ago, people in the region began keeping sheep and cattle and making pottery, and some of the Khoe became herders. Bantu-speaking farmers arrived as part of the long Bantu expansion: the Kalanga in the east from about 200 CE, followed by other groups. They brought iron and copper tools, grew sorghum and millet, built permanent villages of pole-and-clay houses and kept growing herds of cattle, while trading and intermarrying with the San.

Between the eighth and thirteenth centuries the Toutswe chiefdoms of eastern Botswana built hilltop centres such as Toutswemogala, Bosutswe and Mmadipudi, whose huge layers of burnt dung show how many cattle they kept. Glass beads from the Indian Ocean reached the Tsodilo Hills and the east, linking the region to the trade that enriched the kingdom of Mapungubwe on the Limpopo in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and then the Kingdom of Great Zimbabwe from the thirteenth. Great Zimbabwe controlled much of the north-east, where stone-walled sites survive, and after its decline the Kalanga kingdom of Butua, centred in the west of modern Zimbabwe, dominated the area until the nineteenth century.

The Tswana, speakers of a Sotho-Tswana language, originated in the Transvaal of modern South Africa. Their royal lineages split repeatedly as sons of chiefs led followers away to found new chiefdoms, a process made easy by the mobility of cattle wealth. The Kwena moved into south-eastern Botswana, and around the 1530s the Ngwaketse and Ngwato broke away from them; the Tawana later split from the Ngwato and settled near the Okavango Delta. By the eighteenth century these had become states, each governed by a kgosi, or chief, who consulted his people in the kgotla, an open assembly where adult men debated public affairs. Young men were organised into age regiments, mephato, which served as armies and labour forces. Tswana states absorbed many other peoples, including Kalanga, Kgalagadi and San, often in subordinate positions; San were frequently bound as servants and herders.

In the early nineteenth century southern Africa was convulsed by the wars known as the Difaqane or Mfecane, linked to the rise of the Zulu Kingdom and the expansion of European settlement from the Cape Colony. Displaced groups swept across the Tswana lands: the Kololo attacked the Kwena and Ngwaketse in the 1820s before being driven out and moving north towards the Zambezi in modern Zambia, and Mzilikazi's Ndebele raided from the east in the 1830s. Afrikaner trekkers who settled in the Transvaal from the late 1830s pressed on the Tswana from the south-east, seeking land and labour.

Missionaries of the London Missionary Society arrived from 1816, and Robert Moffat produced a written form of Setswana and translated the Bible into it, completed in 1857. David Livingstone lived among the Kwena from 1845 and baptised their chief, Sechele I, who repulsed a Boer attack in 1852. Tswana chiefs used the missionaries as advisers and as links to the British, and traders brought guns, ploughs and wagons. The greatest of the nineteenth-century chiefs was Khama III of the Ngwato, who ruled from 1875 to 1923 from Shoshong and then Palapye and Serowe, a Christian reformer who banned alcohol in his territory and resisted both Boer and Ndebele pressure.

In the 1880s the Tswana were squeezed between the Boer republics and the new colony of German South West Africa, now Namibia, to the west. Britain, anxious to keep a route open from the Cape to the north and to block a German-Boer link, declared a protectorate over the lands north of the Molopo River in 1885, while the Tswana territories to the south became the colony of British Bechuanaland, later absorbed into the Cape. In 1895 the British government planned to hand the protectorate to Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Company. Khama III, Sebele I of the Kwena and Bathoen I of the Ngwaketse travelled to Britain, toured the country to win public support and secured an agreement that kept most of their lands under the Crown; the failure of the Jameson Raid, launched by Rhodes's men from Bechuanaland at the end of that year, ended the plan.

For the next seventy years the British Empire spent as little as possible on Bechuanaland, which it expected eventually to hand to South Africa. Its administrative capital was even outside the territory, at Mafeking in South Africa. The chiefs ruled their reserves under British oversight, collecting a hut tax introduced in 1899, and their power often became more autocratic. The rinderpest epidemic of 1896 to 1897 killed most of the cattle. With few jobs at home, tens of thousands of men went to work in the mines of South Africa, a migration that shaped Tswana society for generations. Britain repeatedly refused South Africa's requests to annex the protectorate, and after 1948 the rise of apartheid made transfer politically impossible. During World War II about 10,000 men from Bechuanaland served with the African Auxiliary Pioneer Corps in the Middle East and Italy.

The heir to the Ngwato chieftaincy, Seretse Khama, grandson of Khama III, married Ruth Williams, a white Englishwoman, while studying in London in 1948. His uncle and regent, Tshekedi Khama, opposed the marriage, but the Ngwato kgotla accepted Seretse in 1949. The British government, under pressure from South Africa, where mixed marriages had just been outlawed, and from Southern Rhodesia, banished Seretse from the protectorate in 1950. The case caused a scandal in Britain, and Seretse was allowed to return in 1956 as a private citizen after renouncing the chieftaincy.

Political parties emerged in the early 1960s. The Bechuanaland People's Party, inspired by South Africa's African National Congress, called for rapid independence, while Seretse Khama founded the Bechuanaland Democratic Party in 1962 with Quett Masire, building a moderate, non-racial movement with wide rural support. A new capital, Gaborone, was built in the mid-1960s on Crown land belonging to no single chiefdom. The Democratic Party won the 1965 election by a large majority, and on 30 September 1966 the country became independent as the Republic of Botswana, with Seretse Khama as president, during the wave of decolonisation that swept the continent. It had only a few kilometres of tarred road, a handful of secondary schools and an economy dependent on cattle and migrant wages.

Within a year of independence the mining company De Beers discovered diamonds at Orapa, which opened in 1971, followed by Letlhakane and, in 1982, Jwaneng, one of the richest diamond mines in the world. The government negotiated a growing share of the profits, forming the joint company Debswana in 1978, and invested the revenue in roads, schools, clinics and water supplies, guided by national development plans and a professional civil service. From independence into the 1990s Botswana had one of the fastest economic growth rates in the world, rising from one of the poorest countries to upper-middle income. It introduced its own currency, the pula, in 1976 and formed the Botswana Defence Force in 1977. Surrounded by white-minority regimes in Rhodesia, South West Africa and South Africa, Botswana sheltered refugees and refused to allow guerrilla bases, and suffered cross-border raids, including a deadly South African raid on Gaborone in 1985.

Seretse Khama died in 1980 and was followed by Quett Masire (1980 to 1998), Festus Mogae (1998 to 2008), Ian Khama, Seretse's son (2008 to 2018), and Mokgweetsi Masisi, all from the Botswana Democratic Party, which won every election for nearly six decades. Elections were regular and generally regarded as free, though the ruling party enjoyed great advantages. The traditional chiefs kept a role through the House of Chiefs and the customary courts.

The greatest crisis of these years was HIV/AIDS. The first case was diagnosed in 1985, and by the late 1990s Botswana had one of the highest infection rates in the world, with life expectancy falling sharply. Under Mogae the country began offering free antiretroviral treatment nationwide in 2002, one of the first in Africa to do so, and life expectancy has since recovered. The government's removal of San communities from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve from 1997 onwards drew international criticism, and in 2006 the High Court ruled that the evictions had been unlawful.

Masisi reversed several of Ian Khama's policies, lifting a ban on elephant hunting, and the two former allies became bitter rivals; Khama went into exile in South Africa in 2021 and was charged with illegally possessing firearms. Same-sex relations were decriminalised during his presidency. In the general election of October 2024 the opposition Umbrella for Democratic Change, led by the lawyer Duma Boko, won a decisive victory and ended the Democratic Party's 58 years in power, the first change of governing party since independence. Boko's government took office during a slump in the global diamond market that sharply reduced state revenues. Shortages of medicines in public hospitals, worsened by cuts in US aid for HIV programmes, led Boko to declare a public health emergency in August 2025 and to call in the army to distribute supplies.