Botswana's history: a protectorate run from outside its borders

Who lived in the Kalahari before the Tswana states

Britannica's history of the country, written by the historian Neil Parsons, opens by calling it the history of the Kalahari area, a zone between the wetter savanna of the north and east and the drier steppe of the south and west. Its first people spoke Khoisan languages, Khoe and San. Depression Shelter in the Tsodilo Hills holds evidence of continuous Khoisan occupation from about 17,000 BCE to about 1650 CE, and in the last centuries before the Common Era some Khoi of the north took up cattle and sheep on the pastures left by retreating lakes. UNESCO, which inscribed Tsodilo on the World Heritage List in 2001, counts over 4,500 rock paintings in an area of about 10 square kilometres and an archaeological record covering at least 100,000 years.

Farmers who spoke Bantu languages came later and brought iron. Britannica dates the earliest Iron Age site in the country, a smelting furnace in the Tswapong Hills near Palapye, to about 190 CE, and grass-mat houses near Molepolole to about 420 CE. Wikipedia's history places the arrival of the Kalanga around 200 CE and the ancestors of the Tswana around 400 CE. Farming settlement had reached the Tsodilo Hills by about 550 CE, beside hunter and herder sites, which is why Britannica treats the hundreds of paintings there as harder to read than the older assumption that San hunters made them alone.

Cattle became wealth early. Between about the seventh and thirteenth centuries rulers on Toutswe hill, within about 100 kilometres of Serowe, governed a farming state built on herds, with large corrals in the capital and in scores of hilltop villages; Britannica notes that ancient corrals are still found by the unusual grass that grows on them. In the thirteenth century Toutswe appears to have fallen to Mapungubwe, centred at the confluence of the Limpopo and Shashe, which was in turn overtaken by Great Zimbabwe. From about 1450 the Butua state, based at Khami near Bulawayo, controlled the salt and hunting-dog trade of the eastern Makgadikgadi Pans and built stone-walled posts around them.

How the Tswana kingdoms formed and moved west

The Tswana dynasties came from the Transvaal. Britannica derives the main houses, Hurutshe, Kwena and Kgatla, from the Phofu dynasty, which broke up in the western Transvaal in the sixteenth century. Wikipedia's history has the Ngwaketse and Ngwato splitting from the Kwena around 1530. Kwena and Hurutshe migrants founded the Ngwaketse chiefdom in the south-east by 1795, and after 1750 it grew into a military state that controlled Kalahari hunting, cattle raiding and copper working west of Kanye. Other Kwena settled around Molepolole; a branch of them, the Ngwato, moved north to Shoshong, and a branch of the Ngwato, the Tawana, founded a state at Lake Ngami by about 1795.

The political unit was the morafe, a community under a kgosi, and its forum was the kgotla, where the chief heard the concerns of the men before deciding. Age regiments called mephato spread among the eastern Tswana from the 1750s. Wikipedia's history describes a nineteenth-century economy with credit, service contracts and the mafisa system, under which the wealthy lent cattle to the poor in return for labour.

Then came two generations of war. Raiding for ivory, cattle and captives spread inland from the coasts of Mozambique, the Cape and Angola from about 1750. By 1824 the Kololo, a people driven north-west by raiders from the east, were attacking the Ngwaketse and killed their king Makaba II; a counter-attack pushed them north in 1826, and they settled on the Chobe around 1835. The Ndebele under Mzilikazi followed and settled in western Zimbabwe in 1838 to 1840. The Tswana states of the Ngwaketse, Kwena, Ngwato and Tawana were rebuilt in the 1840s, and by 1880 Tswana and Khalagari peoples had settled the whole of the present country.

What missionaries and wagon roads brought

The London Missionary Society arrived in 1816. Robert Moffat produced the first Setswana text in a uniform spelling and a dictionary, and both Testaments could be read in Setswana by 1857. David Livingstone opened a mission at Kolobeng in 1845 and baptised Sechele of the Kwena, who ruled from 1829 to 1892 and secured control of the British trade for his people.

Wagons carried ivory and ostrich feathers south to the Cape, and the same roads brought Boer settlers into the Transvaal on the eastern side. In 1852 a coalition of Tswana chiefdoms under Sechele defeated an Afrikaner force at Dimawe, and after years of intermittent fighting a peace was agreed at Potchefstroom in 1860. White prospectors opened gold workings at Tati near Francistown in 1867 to 1869. The rush was short, and men from the territory began to go south to the diamond mines at Kimberley from 1871 and later to the gold mines of the Transvaal.

By the end of the 1870s the trade had passed from the Kwena to the Ngwato under Khama III, who ruled in 1872 and 1873 and again from 1875 to 1923, and whose power reached the Tawana, the Lozi and the Ndebele frontiers. In 1884 a Tawana cavalry under Moremi II defeated an Ndebele invasion of the north at Khutiyabasadi.

Why Britain proclaimed a protectorate it meant to transfer

Where the protectorate's boundaries were drawn

German South West Africa threatened to link up across the Kalahari with the Boer republic of the Transvaal, and the road north through Tswana country was the British route to the Zambezi. In 1885 Lieutenant Colonel Charles Warren marched 4,000 imperial troops north from Cape Town, made treaties with several chiefs and announced a protectorate on 31 March. Land south of the Molopo became the separate crown colony of British Bechuanaland, which went to the Cape Colony in 1895 and is now in South Africa. The northern boundary first ran at 22 degrees south. It was pushed to the Chobe and Ngamiland on 30 June 1890, and Article III of the Heligoland-Zanzibar Treaty, recognised by Germany the next day, fixed the western line and created the Caprivi Strip that Namibia inherited.

Wikipedia's account says that the chiefs feared German settlement and absorption by South Africa or by Rhodes more than British protection, and also notes that not every chief affected was in favour, against what Warren reported at the time. Eight Tswana groups were recognised. The Kwena, Ngwaketse, Ngwato and Tawana received the four large reserves, the Kgatla, Tlokwa and Malete smaller ones, and the Tshidi a reserve across the South African border. Non-Tswana minorities received none.

Why the capital stood outside the territory

Britannica gives the protectorate's administrative capital as Mafeking, in South Africa, from 1895 to 1964; Wikipedia's history places it first at Vryburg and moves it to Mafeking in 1895. The British government regarded the territory as temporary, to be handed to Rhodesia or, after 1910, to the Union of South Africa, and kept investment to a minimum. In 1895 Khama III, Sebele I and Bathoen I travelled to London and persuaded the government not to transfer the land to the British South Africa Company, though they had to concede the railway through their territory; it was built in 1897.

The protectorate paid its own way. A hut tax came in 1899, a poll tax in 1909 and a native tax in 1919, and membership of the customs union with South Africa from 1910 brought only 2% of the union's revenue. Men left to work in South African mines. Britannica describes the territory as divided into eight largely self-governing reserves and five white settler farm blocks, with the rest held as crown land, and as having declined into an appendage of South Africa that supplied labour and a rail route to Rhodesia.

A more active British policy began in 1930, when the protectorate first received direct funding and the Resident Commissioner Charles Rey set about building a cattle export economy. A drought in the early 1930s killed over 60% of the cattle. Rey exiled Sebele II of the Kwena in 1931, and reforms of 1934 meant to limit the chiefs were challenged in court by Bathoen II and Tshekedi Khama; the court ruled against them, but the reforms were never fully carried out.

How Bechuanaland fought the Second World War

Recruitment began in 1941. Wikipedia's history counts about 5,500 men trained and sent within the first six months and about 11,000 in total, over 10,000 of them in the African Auxiliary Pioneer Corps. The chiefs conscripted men although the colonial government wanted service to be voluntary, and some men avoided recruiters by fleeing to South Africa or to the Okavango swamps. Kgari Sechele II of the Kwena and Molefi Pilane of the Kgatla enlisted themselves and served as regimental sergeant majors, the highest rank open to Batswana. The war brought shortages, rationing and higher prices at home, and at its end Batswana were allowed business licences for the first time, a right until then held by whites and Indians.

Why one royal marriage changed the road to independence

Seretse Khama, born in Serowe in 1921 and heir to the Ngwato chieftainship, became kgosi as a small child under the regency of his uncle Tshekedi Khama. While studying law in London he married Ruth Williams, an Englishwoman, in September 1948. Tshekedi demanded an annulment, but a series of kgotla meetings in 1949 confirmed Seretse, and Tshekedi left for the Kwena reserve.

South Africa, which had banned marriage across racial lines in 1949, objected to such a couple ruling across its border. On 8 March 1950 the British government announced that Seretse could not return for at least five years. A judicial enquiry found him fit to rule but for the marriage, and the government suppressed its report for thirty years. Britannica records that secret documents later confirmed the exile was meant to satisfy South Africa.

The Ngwato refused to choose a replacement. Seretse and Ruth returned in 1956 as private citizens after he renounced the chieftainship, and he was elected secretary of the new tribal council in 1957. Wikipedia's history traces the shift of power from chiefs to elected bodies to this period.

Party politics followed. The Bechuanaland People's Party, founded in 1960 as a Tswana counterpart to South Africa's African National Congress, wanted immediate independence and the end of chieftainship. Seretse Khama founded the Bechuanaland Democratic Party in 1962 and the British backed it. A legislative council sat from 1961. A new capital was built at Gaborone on crown land, which no single morafe owned, and the territory became self-governing in 1965 after an election that the Democratic Party won and the People's Party left with three seats. The chiefs kept an advisory House of Chiefs. On 30 September 1966 the protectorate became the Republic of Botswana, with Seretse Khama as president.

What the new republic began with

The sources agree that the country was very poor in 1966 and disagree on the detail. Wikipedia's history gives 10 kilometres of paved road, 40 citizens with university degrees and literacy at 25% at independence; its article on Seretse Khama gives 12 kilometres of paved road, 22 university graduates and 100 secondary-school graduates. Britain paid the full cost of administration for the first five years, a drought at independence killed 30 to 50% of the cattle, and most of the country's labourers worked as migrants in South Africa.

Debswana's own history dates the discovery of kimberlite to 1967. Britannica makes the 1969 renegotiation of the customs union the precondition for what followed, because the state's share of customs revenue then rose with mineral exports and capital imports. Mineral rights passed from the merafe to the central government in 1967. According to Wikipedia's article on Seretse Khama, the 1975 renegotiation with De Beers guaranteed the government 50% of diamond revenue, and Debswana, the joint company, followed in 1978. The pula of 100 thebe replaced the rand on 23 August 1976, according to the Encyclopedia of the Nations. Wikipedia's history puts diamonds at 10% of GDP in 1973 and at a peak of 53% in the mid-1980s.

There was no army at independence. Raids by Rhodesian and South African forces chasing guerrillas led to the Botswana Defence Force in 1977, and the next year an attack at Leshoma killed fifteen soldiers. In 1980 Botswana and eight other states founded the Southern African Development Co-ordination Conference in Lusaka, the body that became SADC, whose headquarters now stand in Gaborone. Seretse Khama died on 13 July 1980 and was succeeded by Quett Masire.

How the state was tested after the founding generation

The first case of HIV was diagnosed in 1985, and Wikipedia's history records life expectancy falling from 67 to 50 by 1997. In 2002, by Britannica's account, Botswana became the first African country to provide antiretroviral treatment free to all citizens.

In 1991 the Kgabo Commission found that the vice-president Peter Mmusi and the party secretary general Daniel Kwelagobe had committed ethical violations over land boards. Both resigned, the Democratic Party split into factions, and the Directorate on Corruption and Economic Crime was set up in 1994. Also in 1991 a case brought by Unity Dow established that children could take citizenship from their mothers, which the Citizenship Act of 1995 wrote into law.

The removal of San communities from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve began in 1995 and is recorded with two readings. The government said its purpose was to integrate remote communities and protect wildlife; international organisations accused it of coercion and of clearing land for mining. A legal challenge by the San in 2002 was dismissed.

Late in Masire's presidency the voting age fell from 21 to 18 and the presidency gained automatic succession and a term limit. The border dispute with Namibia over Sedudu Island in the Chobe went to the International Court of Justice, which ruled for Botswana in 1999. Elections were held every five years from independence, and the Democratic Party won all of them until the general election of 2024, when it lost its majority after 58 years in government and the Umbrella for Democratic Change, a coalition formed in 2012, took office. Later chapters of that story belong to Botswana: politics.