Botswana

About 70 per cent of Botswana is Kalahari, a vast basin of red and grey sand with grass and thorn scrub rather than bare dunes. It has no permanent rivers except in the north, and most people live along the wetter eastern edge, where Gaborone and the railway run.

The Okavango River rises in the Angolan highlands, flows through Namibia's Caprivi and spreads into the Kalahari as a fan-shaped delta of channels, lagoons and islands. It never reaches the sea: almost all the water evaporates or sinks into the sand. Rain that falls in Angola in the summer takes months to arrive, so the flood peaks in Botswana's dry winter, June to August, just when animals across the region need water.

Many Delta islands started as termite mounds, raised above the flood and colonised by palms and trees. Tectonic faults, an extension of the East African Rift, control the Delta's edges, and small earthquakes shift channels from year to year.

The Makgadikgadi Pans, the remains of a huge ancient lake, cover about 16,000 km² of salt crust. In the rains they flood shallowly and draw flamingos and a zebra and wildebeest migration; in the dry season they are a white, flat void where visitors sleep out under the stars.

The Tsodilo Hills in the north-west hold over 4,500 rock paintings and evidence of human presence stretching back about 100,000 years; the San still call them the 'mountains of the gods'. San hunter-gatherers once ranged across the Kalahari; their tracking skill, knowledge of plants and water, and click languages are among the oldest living traditions in the world.

Tswana-speaking farmers and herders spread into the east from about the 17th century, forming chiefdoms, merafe, such as the Bangwato, Bakwena and Bangwaketse, each around a capital town and a kgosi (chief). Decisions were debated at the kgotla, an open-air public assembly that still meets in every village and influences modern governance.

The Wayeyi and Hambukushu of the Okavango lived by fishing, reed crafts and dugout canoes, the mokoro still used for visitor trips. Kalanga, Herero (who fled German genocide in Namibia) and others add to the country's mix.

In the 20th century many San were pushed off land for cattle and conservation. In 2006 a landmark court case gave some San the right to return to the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, but access to water and hunting rights remain contested.

Under pressure from Boer settlers in the east and German expansion in the west, Tswana chiefs sought British protection, and the Bechuanaland Protectorate was declared in 1885. In 1895 three chiefs, Khama III, Sebele and Bathoen, travelled to London to stop Britain handing the territory to Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Company, and succeeded.

Britain ran the protectorate cheaply from Mafikeng, inside South Africa, and built almost nothing. At independence the country had a few kilometres of tarred road and a handful of secondary schools.

Seretse Khama, heir to the Bangwato chieftaincy, married Ruth Williams, a white Englishwoman, in 1948. Under pressure from apartheid South Africa, Britain exiled him until 1956. He returned to lead the Botswana Democratic Party and became the first president at independence on 30 September 1966.

His government chose non-racial politics, invested in education and kept out of the wars around it while quietly hosting refugees. Botswana has held regular multiparty elections ever since; in 2024 the BDP lost power for the first time and Duma Boko became president in a peaceful handover.

Diamonds were found at Orapa in 1967, a year after independence, then at Jwaneng, one of the richest diamond mines on earth. The government negotiated a 50–50 partnership with De Beers, Debswana, and put the revenue into roads, schools, clinics and a sovereign fund. Botswana went from one of the poorest countries in the world to upper-middle income.

Cattle are the other wealth, economic and social: owning cattle is status, bride price and savings. Veterinary fences built to keep foot-and-mouth disease away from export herds cut across wildlife migration routes; visitors meet their checkpoints on the roads, where raw meat may be confiscated.

The economy depends heavily on diamonds, and the fall in natural-diamond demand from lab-grown stones hit revenues hard in 2024–25. Tourism, the second-largest earner, is being pushed as a diversification.

The high-value, low-volume tourism policy of the 1990s set the country's safari style: a few camps in large private concessions leased from the state or communities, with high prices and low vehicle numbers. Community trusts around the Delta receive concession fees.

Northern Botswana holds the largest elephant population in the world, around 130,000, many of them concentrated around the Chobe and Linyanti rivers in the dry season. As populations in neighbouring countries fell, elephants moved into Botswana, and the herds now damage woodland and crops.

Botswana banned commercial trophy hunting in 2014 and reinstated it in 2019, arguing that villages living with elephants need income and control. Debates over hunting, culling and ivory sales run through regional and international politics.

Rhinos were almost wiped out in the country and reintroduced from South Africa, with a high-profile translocation to the Okavango from 2015; poaching has since forced dehorning and moving many animals to safer areas.

The Okavango became UNESCO's 1,000th World Heritage Site in 2014. The biggest long-term threats are upstream water use in Angola and Namibia, climate change and oil exploration in the Kavango basin.

About 2.4 million people live in Botswana, a third of them around Gaborone. Setswana is spoken by most, English is the language of school and government, and 'Dumela Rra' or 'Dumela Mma' opens every exchange. Respect for elders and chiefs is strong, and the kgotla still settles village disputes.

Seswaa, beef boiled and pounded, is the national dish, served at weddings, funerals and national celebrations with bogobe (sorghum porridge) or pap. Phane, the mopane worm, is harvested and dried each year. Chibuku sorghum beer in cartons is the everyday drink in rural bars.

Botswana had one of the world's highest HIV rates in the early 2000s and became the first African country to offer free antiretroviral treatment nationally, in 2002. Life expectancy has since recovered strongly.

Christianity is the main faith, mixed with belief in ancestors. 'Pula', rain, is the currency's name, the national motto and a blessing shouted at celebrations, which says a lot about life on the edge of the Kalahari.