BOTSWANA

	CLIMATE
	The climate is very dry, but an unreliable summer rainy season lasts from October to April. The northeast receives the most rain, the southwest very little. In the extreme north and southwest, temperatures rise to 93°F (43°C). In some areas the winter temperature can fall below freezing during the day.

First Inhabitants

Cave paintings reveal some information about the earliest-known people who lived in southern Africa, including present-day Botswana (bawt-SWAH-nah), thousands of years ago. The San (SAHN) people ate mostly fruit, nuts, and insects and used poisoned arrows to hunt wild animals. They moved from place to place in groups, having no permanent homes and no leaders. The Khoi-Khoi (KOY-koy) were also nomads, but they kept cattle and sheep. Together these two groups are known as Khoisan-speakers.

About fifteen hundred years ago, people who spoke Bantu (BAN-too) began arriving. These people kept cattle, knew how to work iron, and cultivated crops, such as sorghum and millet. They lived and intermarried with the Khoisan-speakers. Recent archaeological work in eastern Botswana has uncovered hilltop settlements that were inhabited from about 700 to 1300 C.E., probably by these Bantu-speakers. A series of droughts and possible overuse of the land’s resources forced the people to abandon these settlements in the 1300s.

The Tswana (TSWA-nah) and Kgalagadi (kih-gah-lah-GAH-dee) people may have descended from these peoples. They originated in the area east of modern Botswana later known as Transvaal. In the sixteenth century large groups of Tswana began to move westward into modern Botswana. By the seventeenth century the merafe (meh-rah-FEE), or nations, from which the modern Tswana peoples of Botswana are descended, were emerging.

A Time of War

By the end of the eighteenth century, the Tswana people were occupying large areas of southern Africa and competing over cattle and trade. In the 1820s the Ndebele (deh-BAE-lee) people moved away from the Zulu kingdom in southeastern Africa and established a strong military kingdom just east of Botswana. For twenty years their regiments raided the neighboring Tswana. Some of the large merafe broke up; small groups of people wandered, looking for food, unable to settle anywhere long enough to grow crops.

Dutch settlers had been living at the Cape of Good Hope, the southernmost tip of Africa, since the mid-1600s. In the 1830s many of these farmers (known as Afrikaners) began trekking inland to find new pastures for their cattle and to get away from the British, who had taken control of the Cape in 1806. These Afrikaners came into conflict with the Ndebele people and, with the help of local Tswana, eventually drove the Ndebele northward. The Afrikaner farmers settled in the Transvaal, depriving the Tswana of their lands there. More Tswana groups joined those already in modern Botswana.

With the defeat of the Ndebele, the worst of the wars were over. However, it was the Afrikaners who now threatened the Tswana merafe. The Tswana rulers acquired guns and horses from traders from the British Cape colony. The modern eastern boundary of Botswana marks the extent of the Tswana’s successful defense of their land from invasion by Afrikaners in the 1850s.