Botswana

Printer-friendly versionDespite its considerable expanse, Botswana is extremely sparsely populated, with a population density figure of only three persons per square kilometre. Indeed, only 1.7-million people live here, which places it low down – in the last 20 – of the world population rankings.

The oldest ethnic grouping in Botswana is undoubtedly the San (or AbaThwa). As across the entire Southern African region, these stone-age people were the first human occupants, and still today comprise significant groupings in Botswana in particular, often occupying remote areas within the Kalahari Desert. At least 1 500 years ago, possibly earlier, iron-age Bantu people had expanded south from their original homes in West Africa and had begun penetrating into present-day South Africa.

Nguni immigrants moved through the eastern coastal regions of the country; while the Sotho-Tswana wave occupied the centre of the country, finally settling in the Southern African central plateau now identified as the South African provinces of North West and Northern Cape, and in the more fertile tracts of Botswana.

It was only in the 19th century that present-day Botswana took shape as a political entity. Tensions between tribes had been exacerbated by the Difaqane upheavals, described by one historian as ‘one of the most formative events of African history’. 4 With Shaka’s formidable Zulu armies at the epicentre, hardly a tribe or ethnic grouping anywhere in and around South Africa was left untouched.

Added to this fundamental unrest was the introduction of European settlers in the shape of the Boer communities who appeared to the north of the Vaal River with the advent of the Great Trek in the late 1830s. The Tswana tribes of the region lived an increasingly precarious existence, until finally their leaders appealed to the British for protection. The result was the  establishment of the Bechuanaland Protectorate in 1885, a territory that was ultimately divided between the then Cape Colony, with the northern parts remaining under British control. When union was achieved in South Africa in 1910, the three so-called High Commission Territories of Basutoland, Swaziland and the Bechuanaland Protectorate were not included. This paved the way for self-government, and the eventual creation of the Botswanan state, a parliamentary republic, in 1966, with Seretse Khama as its first president.

Socio-economic conditions in the country have, since then, generally been conducive to steady growth, and today Botswana is one of the success stories of post-Uhuru Africa. The currency, the Pula, is the strongest in the SADC region; and per capita GDP, at nearly US $6000, is among the region’s highest. The Botswanan economy has been built on foreign investment and foreign management skills, which has resulted in the rapid growth of the financial and services sectors, as well as increasing manufacturing activity. By the early 2000s these activities had outstripped mining as the leading revenue generators in the economy.

Important pillars of the nation’s economic policy include: no prohibition on foreign ownership of companies, a privatisation master plan, and a national export development strategy. Botswana, which has enjoyed some form of tertiary education facilities since 1966, ranks as Africa’s least corrupt country and the continent’s best credit risk.