Botswana
Capital: Gaborone · Southern Africa
Tswana merafe (chiefdoms) with their kgotla democratic assemblies, and the Kalahari's San peoples whose rock art at Tsodilo spans millennia.
Ethnic communities
- BatswanaEight principal merafe; kgotla public-assembly governance
- San (Basarwa)First peoples of the Kalahari; trance-dance healing
- BakalangaNortheastern people linked to Great Zimbabwe culture
More communities of Botswana
- Bangwato · Khama's royal morafe of the central country
- Bakwena · Senior Tswana kingdom of Molepolole
- Bangwaketse · Southern morafe of strong chiefship
- Batawana · Ngamiland's Okavango-delta kingdom
- Bakgatla · Border morafe of vigorous regiments
- Balete & Batlokwa · Southeastern smaller merafe
- Barolong · Border farmers of deep Tswana lineage
- San (Ju|'hoansi, Naro, G|ui) · Kalahari first peoples (full profile)
- Bakgalagadi · Desert-edge Tswana-related communities
- Bayeyi · Delta river people of mokoro poling
- Hambukushu · Okavango rainmaker-farmers
- Basubiya · Chobe floodplain agro-fishers
- Herero & Mbanderu · 1904 refuge communities in the west
- Batswapong & Babirwa · Eastern hills' farming communities
Languages
Major languages: Setswana, English, Kalanga, San languages
Language families: Niger-Congo (Bantu); Khoe-Kwadi, Kx'a, Tuu (San)
Historical kingdoms & states
- • Tswana merafe (Bangwato, Bakwena, Bangwaketse)
- • Butua (Kalanga) state
Heritage sites
- • Tsodilo Hills ('Louvre of the Desert')
- • Okavango Delta
Cultural highlights
National heroes of Botswana
See all African heroesFigures widely honoured here, across politics, sport, the arts and public life.
- Music & the arts1937–1986
Bessie Head
Literature
Born in South Africa and stateless for years in Serowe, she wrote When Rain Clouds Gather and A Question of Power, now central to Botswana's literary identity.
- Sportb. 2003
Letsile Tebogo
Sprinting
Won Botswana's first Olympic gold in any sport with a 19.46 African record in the 200m in Paris in 2024, dedicating it to his late mother.
- Politics & liberation1921–1980
Seretse Khama
Independence and governance
Exiled by Britain over his marriage to Ruth Williams, he returned to lead Botswana to independence in 1966 and built one of Africa's most durable democracies on newly found diamond wealth.
- Science, business & activismb. 1959
Unity Dow
Law and literature
Won the case that ended sex discrimination in Botswana's citizenship law, then became the country's first woman high court judge.
Deep-dive community profiles
Bakgalagadi
The first Sotho-Tswana speakers in the Kalahari — pushed into the desert by later arrivals, made clients of the Tswana states, and now caught between their own land claims and the eviction of the San from the Central Kalahari reserve they share.
Open deep profile →Bakuena
The crocodile people — the senior Basotho lineage from which Moshoeshoe I came, whose totem gave the kingdom its royal house, and whose clan name is carried by chiefdoms across three countries.
Open deep profile →Basubiya
River people of the Chobe and Zambezi floodplain whose kingdom once held the whole four-country corner, who were pushed aside by the Lozi and then the Kololo, and whose land was fenced off for a national park in 1960.
Open deep profile →Batswapong
The people of the eastern hills — communities of the Tswapong range whose sacred gorges hold rain shrines consulted across Botswana, and who were subject peoples under the Bangwato before independence gave them their own voice.
Open deep profile →Bayei
The people who brought the mokoro — Okavango Delta fishers and hippo hunters who arrived from the Zambezi in the eighteenth century with the dugout canoe and the fish trap, and who now pole tourists through the channels they mapped.
Open deep profile →Hambukushu
The rainmakers of the Okavango panhandle — farmers and fishers whose chiefs were sought across the region for their control of rain, and whose baskets, coiled from palm and dyed with bark, are among southern Africa's most collected craft.
Open deep profile →Herero (Ovaherero)
The cattle-herders of central Namibia — whose women's Victorian-derived otjikaiva dresses and horn-shaped headdresses are worn in proud defiance, whose sacred ancestral fire (okuruwo) never dies, and who survived the 20th century's first genocide.
Open deep profile →Kalanga
The builders' descendants — a people whose ancestors raised the stone walls of Khami and Great Zimbabwe's successor states, whose Mwali shrine at Njelele is still consulted for rain by two countries, and whose language is taught in neither.
Open deep profile →San (Bushmen)
The first peoples of southern Africa — carriers of some of humanity's oldest lineages and its oldest continuous art tradition, whose click languages, trance-dance healing and encyclopedic desert knowledge stretch back tens of thousands of years.
Open deep profile →Tswana (Batswana)
The people of the kgotla — southern Africa's great tradition of public deliberation — whose agro-pastoral towns were among precolonial Africa's largest, and whose consensus politics seeded one of the continent's most stable democracies.
Open deep profile →