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
Deep-dive community profiles
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 →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 →