Long before the idea of Botswana existed, these lands were already inhabited. The ancestors of the San and Khoe peoples —often grouped under the name Khoisan or Sarwa— have lived in what is now Botswana for tens of thousands of years, perhaps from 40,000 to 30,000 years ago. The San were hunter-gatherers, experts at reading the desert, tracking animals and finding water where an outsider's eye saw only sand. They are, in all likelihood, one of the oldest continuous human lineages in existence.
The most striking evidence of that ancient presence is the Tsodilo Hills, in the country's northwest. There, on four quartzite hills that the San consider sacred —the Male, the Female, the Child and a fourth with no name—, around 400 sites hold more than 4,500 rock paintings, which earned the place the nickname "the Louvre of the desert". The area shows traces of human occupation going back some 100,000 years, and in 2001 UNESCO declared it a World Heritage Site. Most of the red paintings, dated mainly to the first millennium AD, were made by the San; some are attributed to the Khoe herders who arrived later.
The Khoe brought livestock and a more pastoral way of life, and with them the human landscape began to change. But for millennia southern Africa was, above all, the world of the San: their paintings, their click language and their deep knowledge of the Kalahari are the oldest layer on which everything else was built. That legacy lives on, though scarred by centuries of dispossession, in the San communities that still live in the desert today.
From the first centuries AD, the great Bantu expansion reached southern Africa. Farming and iron-working peoples gradually arrived in the region, and around the year 400 the first Tswana (or Batswana) groups came, Setswana speakers who would in time become dominant on the plateau. They brought cattle, crops, metalworking and a form of political organisation that would shape the country.
The Tswana organised themselves into chiefdoms or "tribes" called merafe (singular, morafe), each headed by a hereditary chief, the kgosi (plural dikgosi). The splits and migrations of the following centuries gave rise to the great merafe that still structure Botswana today: the Bangwato of Serowe, the Bakwena, the Bangwaketse, the Batawana of the Okavango, the Bakgatla, the Balete, the Barolong and the Batlokwa, among others. Each had its capital, its territory and its cattle, the ultimate measure of wealth and power.
The heart of that political culture was —and still is— the kgotla: the community assembly held in the open air, usually under a tree or inside a log enclosure, where the kgosi listens to the people and any adult man can speak up and disagree. "Kgosi ke kgosi ka batho", as the proverb goes: "a chief is a chief by the people". That tradition of deliberation, consensus and accountability, far more participatory than other African monarchies, would become one of the deep roots of modern Botswana's exceptional democratic stability.
The 19th century began in upheaval. Between 1810 and 1840, southern Africa was shaken by the Difaqane (or Mfecane), a wave of wars, forced migrations and famines unleashed by the rise of the Zulu kingdom and the domino effect of peoples fleeing violence and overrunning others in their path. The Tswana merafe suffered devastating attacks from groups such as the Bakololo and the Amandebele (Matabele); entire villages were destroyed, and many communities had to regroup, merge or move in order to survive. Some chiefdoms that managed to rally around strong leaders came out of that chaos stronger.
At the same time another force arrived, this one from Europe: Christian missionaries. The London Missionary Society set up stations in the territory, and figures such as Robert Moffat and, above all, David Livingstone —who lived and preached among the Bakwena of chief Sechele in the 1840s— left a lasting mark. The missionaries brought written Setswana, literacy, the printing press and a relationship with Britain that the Tswana chiefs would learn to use to their advantage. Many dikgosi converted to Christianity, among them the celebrated Khama III of the Bangwato.
But the most serious threat came from the south and east. The Boers of the Transvaal, settlers of Dutch origin, were pushing west in search of land and labour, and clashed repeatedly with the Tswana. Caught between the Boers, the Matabele and, later, the imperial ambitions of Cecil Rhodes, the Tswana chiefs reached a pragmatic conclusion: to avoid being swallowed up, it made sense to seek the umbrella —costly but less voracious— of the British Crown.
On 31 March 1885, Britain proclaimed the Bechuanaland Protectorate over the territory of the Tswana, largely at the request of their own chiefs, who preferred British protection to the advance of the Boers. It was not a settler colony like Rhodesia or South Africa: London committed to minimal, low-cost rule, with almost no investment and no settlers, leaving much of the internal administration in the hands of the dikgosi. The administrative capital was, curiously, located outside the territory itself: in Mafeking (Mafikeng), on South African soil.
That fragile balance nearly broke in the mid-1890s. Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Company, which already controlled present-day Zambia and Zimbabwe, was pushing to annex Bechuanaland too. Faced with the danger, in 1895 three chiefs —Khama III of the Bangwato, Sebele I of the Bakwena and Bathoen I of the Bangwaketse— set off on an extraordinary journey to England. They toured the country with the help of the London Missionary Society, spoke in churches and halls, won over British public opinion and secured an audience with the Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, and with Queen Victoria.
Their mission succeeded: it was agreed that the protectorate would remain under the direct control of the Crown and not pass to Rhodes's company. It was a brilliant diplomatic move that saved Bechuanaland from the harshest colonial greed and kept the authority of the merafe intact. Today the Three Dikgosi Monument, in central Gaborone, honours Khama, Sebele and Bathoen as founding fathers of the nation. In the decades that followed, the protectorate remained a poor, forgotten corner of the empire, run from outside, while awareness grew that self-government would one day come.
The story of Botswana's independence is inseparable from one man and a love story that shook two empires. Seretse Khama, grandson of Khama III and heir to the Bangwato throne, was studying law in England when, in 1948, he married Ruth Williams, a young white Englishwoman. With apartheid taking hold, the interracial marriage scandalised the neighbouring South African government, which put pressure on London. Giving in to that pressure, in 1950 the British government barred Seretse from taking up the Bangwato chieftaincy and banished him from his own land for six years.
The exile of Seretse and Ruth became a cause célèbre. Amid protests from his people and much of international opinion, the couple were only allowed to return in 1956, after Seretse formally renounced his claim to the throne. Back home, Seretse turned his prestige into modern politics: in 1962 he founded, with Quett Masire, the Bechuanaland Democratic Party (BDP), a moderate, multi-ethnic force committed to a peaceful, negotiated transition to independence.
The process was remarkably orderly. In 1965 the protectorate gained internal self-government, the capital moved from distant Mafeking to the newly built Gaborone, and the BDP won the first general election, with Seretse Khama as prime minister. On 30 September 1966, Bechuanaland became the independent Republic of Botswana, and Seretse Khama was sworn in as its first president. With no liberation war and no coups, a country considered unviable set out on its path as a sovereign nation.
Botswana was born desperately poor. On the eve of independence it was one of the poorest countries in the world: a subsistence cattle economy, recurring droughts, almost no infrastructure or trained staff, and reliant on money sent home by men who migrated to work in South Africa's mines. Just a few months after it raised its flag, however, the land handed it a gift that would change everything.
On 1 March 1967, a team of De Beers geologists led by Gavin Lamont discovered a huge kimberlite pipe full of diamonds at Orapa, in the east-centre of the country. It was the first of several colossal finds: Orapa (in production since 1971) was followed by Letlhakane and, in 1982, Jwaneng, which would become the richest diamond mine in the world by value. Suddenly, Africa's most unlikely country was sitting on one of the greatest mineral fortunes on the planet.
The key was not just having diamonds, but what was done with them. Seretse Khama's government negotiated hard: rather than leave the whole business in foreign hands, in 1969 it created the joint venture Debswana, owned 50% by the Botswana state and 50% by De Beers, and steadily increased its share of the profits. With that income, instead of squandering it or diverting it into private accounts —as happened in so many resource-rich states—, Botswana built schools, hospitals, roads, clean water supplies and a competent civil service. Diamond revenue was invested in people. That contrast with the "resource curse" that ruined other African countries is what the economic literature rightly calls the "Botswana miracle".
Seretse Khama governed until his death in 1980, and the transfer of power set the tone for the decades that followed: constitutional, orderly and uneventful. He was succeeded by his vice-president, Quett (Ketumile) Masire, who governed until 1998; then came the economist Festus Mogae (1998-2008); then Ian Khama (2008-2018), Seretse's son and a career soldier; and later Mokgweetsi Masisi. For almost six decades the Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) won every election, but within a genuinely multi-party framework, with a free press, an independent judiciary and regular elections, something exceptional on the continent.
Botswana also faced very hard tests. In the early 2000s it had one of the highest HIV/AIDS infection rates in the world, an epidemic that threatened to undo all its achievements. The response was pioneering: in 2002, Mogae's government launched one of the first public programmes in Africa to offer free antiretroviral treatment, a policy that saved hundreds of thousands of lives and became an international model. Meanwhile, the country cautiously diversified its economy —high-value tourism, financial services, cattle ranching—, although diamonds remained the heart of its finances, with all the risks that brings when the world market falls.
The most recent chapter was historic. In the October 2024 election, with the economy hit by falling diamond sales, youth unemployment and a demand for renewal, the BDP was defeated for the first time since independence: the opposition coalition Umbrella for Democratic Change (UDC), led by Duma Boko, won, and President Masisi conceded defeat. It was the first peaceful handover of power between parties in almost 60 years, the ultimate test of maturity for a democracy many had considered impossible. Today's Botswana —prosperous, stable, guardian of the Okavango and its elephants— still grapples with inequality, dependence on diamonds and old tensions with its San communities, but it carries a legacy few countries in the world can match: having turned desert, poverty and uncertainty into one of Africa's quietest and most admirable success stories.
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Northeastern Botswana is defined by water. The Chobe River —known upstream as the Kwando and the Linyanti— runs along the country's northern border and flows into the Zambezi, very close to the spot where four nations come together: Botswana, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe. This river quadrant, one of the few places in the world where four countries almost touch, has for centuries been a crossroads of peoples, cattle and trade.
The Chobe's permanent water, in the middle of an otherwise dry region, turns its banks into a magnet for life. In the dry season, when the inland waterholes run out, tens of thousands of animals come down to the river to drink, and its banks become one of the greatest wildlife spectacles in Africa. That abundance is what prompted the first attempts to protect the area, as far back as colonial times.
Historically, these lands were home to peoples such as the Basubiya and the Batawana, and to San communities. The nearby Zambezi also tied them to the great exploration and trade routes of the 19th century; not far away, in 1855, David Livingstone became the first European to set eyes on Victoria Falls, which the locals called Mosi-oa-Tunya, "the smoke that thunders".
Chobe National Park, established in 1967 —just a year after independence—, was Botswana's first national park, an early move by the young nation to protect its natural heritage. Over time it became one of the most famous safari destinations on the continent and a symbol of the country's conservation policy.
Its fame comes, above all, from the elephants. Botswana is home to Africa's largest elephant population —more than 130,000 animals—, and a huge share of them is concentrated in and around the Chobe ecosystem, which reaches the highest density of elephants on the planet. Watching them in herds of dozens or hundreds coming down to the river at sunset, among buffalo, hippos, crocodiles and clouds of birds, is the image that defines the park.
The classic way to experience Chobe is a sunset cruise on the Chobe River: a boat gliding past the animals gathered on the bank while the sun sinks into the water. That abundance also brings challenges: the extremely high density of elephants creates conflicts with local communities and pressure on the vegetation, and managing that population is one of the big debates in Botswana's conservation today.
At the gates of the park, where the Chobe and Zambezi rivers meet, lies Kasane, the main town of the northeast and the logistics base for the whole region. It's a quiet, green town surrounded by wildlife —it's not unusual to see elephants or warthogs wandering its streets—, with a small international airport connecting it to Johannesburg, Gaborone and Maun.
Kasane's big advantage is its strategic location. It's only an hour from the Zimbabwe border and from Victoria Falls, one of the seven natural wonders of the world, which makes it the perfect meeting point for combining a Chobe safari with a visit to the falls. From here many travellers also cross into Zambia or Namibia, making the most of that unique four-country junction.
That crossroads role was strengthened in 2021 with the opening of the Kazungula Bridge, a major structure over the Zambezi that links Botswana and Zambia directly and replaced the old, slow ferry. The bridge sped up trade and transport across southern Africa and established Kasane as a regional hub, both for the trucks crossing the continent and for the tourists coming after the elephants and the smoke that thunders.
Further inland, in the southwest of the greater Chobe ecosystem, lie two regions that are legendary among safari lovers: Savuti and Linyanti. Savuti is famous for its geological mystery: the Savuti Channel fills and dries up for entire decades for no obvious reason, following water pulses and tectonic shifts that still puzzle scientists. For years the channel stays dead, a bed of sand; then, suddenly, the water returns and life explodes.
Those extreme dynamics made Savuti the setting for famous natural dramas. Its lions developed the unusual habit of hunting young elephants, especially in the dry season, when food is scarce; documentary makers from all over the world have filmed these epic clashes between the lion prides and the elephants that depend on the region's few waterholes.
Further north, Linyanti is an area of wetlands and woodland along the river of the same name, on the border with Namibia. Largely run as low-impact private concessions, in the dry season it gathers very dense herds of elephants and offers some of the best African wild dog sightings on the continent. Savuti and Linyanti are Botswana at its wildest and most exclusive: remote, uncrowded and devoted to a conservation tourism that puts untouched nature first.
In the far northwest of this region, near the border with Namibia, rise the Tsodilo Hills, one of the oldest and most sacred places in southern Africa. Four quartzite hills burst out of the sandy plain like islands of stone; the San call them the Male, the Female, the Child and a fourth hill with no name, and consider them the home of spirits and ancestors. For many peoples in the area it is still a place of pilgrimage and reverence.
Its worldwide fame comes from its art. Tsodilo holds around 400 sites with more than 4,500 rock paintings —animals, human figures, geometric symbols— spanning thousands of years, which earned it the nickname "the Louvre of the desert". Human occupation here goes back some 100,000 years, and the best-known red paintings were made mainly in the first millennium AD, by the San and, later, by Khoe herders. In 2001 UNESCO declared it a World Heritage Site, the first in Botswana.
Visiting Tsodilo means walking trails between the hills following the paintings, often with guides from local communities who pass on the stories and beliefs tied to each site. It is tangible proof that this land, now associated with luxury safaris, was for millennia the world of the first inhabitants of southern Africa.
The Okavango Delta is one of the great natural wonders of the planet and a geographical marvel that is hard to believe: a delta that never reaches the sea. The Okavango River rises in the highlands of Angola, runs for hundreds of kilometres and, on reaching the flat basin of the Kalahari, instead of meeting an ocean fans out into a vast spread of channels, lagoons and islands until it evaporates and seeps into the desert sand. It is the largest inland delta in the world.
Its rhythm is as astonishing as its shape. The flood does not coincide with the local rains: the water that falls in Angola takes months to arrive, so the Delta peaks in the middle of Botswana's dry season, between June and August, just when the rest of the country is parched. That pulse of water makes the Okavango a magnet for wildlife: elephants, buffalo, hippos, crocodiles, lions, antelope and an extraordinary wealth of birds gather along its channels. In 2014 the Delta became the 1,000th site on UNESCO's World Heritage List.
The traditional way to get around the Delta is the mokoro, a slender canoe the guide propels standing up with a pole, gliding silently between reeds and water lilies. That low-impact, high-value tourism model —few visitors, exclusive camps, light aircraft instead of roads— is a deliberate choice by Botswana to protect an ecosystem as fragile as it is spectacular.
The people who dominate this corner of the country are the Batawana, a branch of the Bangwato who at the end of the 18th century broke away from the main morafe and migrated northwest, towards the waters of the Okavango, in search of grazing and independence. They settled around Lake Ngami and the lands of the Delta, in the region now known as Ngamiland, and set up their own chiefdom.
Their capital, Maun, was founded in 1915 as the seat of the Batawana kgosi. The name comes from "maung", which in the San language means something like "the place of short reeds". For much of the 20th century, Maun was a remote cattle and trading post on the edge of the Kalahari, famous for its frontier feel, its dusty bars and its hunters. It was so isolated that getting there was an expedition in itself.
Everything changed with the safari boom in the second half of the 20th century. Tarred roads and the building of the airport turned Maun into the gateway to the Delta and Botswana's "safari capital": the last town to stock up, hire a 4x4 or board a light aircraft before heading into the wild. Today it is a large, sprawling town on the banks of the Thamalakane River, a mix of traditional Batawana village and bustling international tourist hub.
In the heart of the Delta lies the Moremi Game Reserve, considered one of the finest wildlife areas in Africa. But what makes it unique is not only its wildlife but its origin: Moremi was proclaimed in 1963, still in protectorate times, by decision of the Batawana community itself, alarmed by uncontrolled hunting and the degradation of their land. It was one of the first protected areas in Africa created on the initiative of an African people, rather than imposed from above by a colonial administration.
The drive came largely from the Batawana royal family, and the reserve is named after chief Moremi III. That decision —giving up part of their hunting grounds to conserve them— proved visionary: Moremi protects a mosaic of lagoons, islands, mopane woodland and floodplains where lions, leopards, cheetahs, elephants and the rare, much sought-after African wild dogs now live side by side, the latter one of the area's biggest draws.
Moremi embodies the conservation model that would come to define Botswana: the idea that protecting nature could be not only a duty but also a source of pride and livelihood for communities. Combining 4x4 game drives with boat and mokoro trips, the reserve is the crowning piece of the great Okavango ecosystem and an early symbol of Botswana's commitment to its natural heritage.
The Kalahari covers much of Botswana and shapes its character: it isn't a desert of barren dunes like the Sahara, but a vast "thirstland" covered in grasses, shrubs and acacias, which turns green and fills with life in the rainy season. It's one of the largest continuous stretches of sand in the world, and for millennia it was the realm of the San, the region's first inhabitants.
The San of the Kalahari developed an astonishing knowledge of the desert: they knew how to find water in roots and tubers, track animals by almost invisible footprints, store liquid in ostrich eggshells and survive in one of the harshest environments on the planet. Their hunter-gatherer culture, their techniques and their relationship with the land are a human heritage of incalculable value.
That age-old relationship with the desert was deeply disrupted in the 20th and 21st centuries. The spread of cattle ranching, veterinary fences, the creation of reserves and resettlement policies gradually pushed many San communities off their ancestral lands. The tension between wildlife conservation, economic interests and the rights of indigenous peoples remains one of the most sensitive debates in Botswana.
The Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR) is one of the largest protected areas in the world: an immense, remote territory of austere beauty, famous for the huge skies over Deception Valley, its black-maned lions, its cheetahs and the herds that appear after the rains. It was created in 1961, still under the protectorate, with an unusual double purpose: to protect the wildlife and, at the same time, to serve as a refuge for the San communities who had lived there since time immemorial.
Over the decades, however, that second purpose ran into crisis. Between the late 1990s and the early 2000s, the government relocated thousands of San outside the reserve, to settlements beyond its borders, citing development and conservation. The San protested that they were being driven off their ancestral land and cut off from water. The conflict ended up in court.
In 2006, in a landmark ruling, Botswana's High Court sided with the San and declared their eviction unlawful, recognising their right to live and hunt inside the reserve. Even so, enforcing that ruling was contentious, and tensions over access to water and land went on for years. The CKGR remains the symbol of an unresolved dilemma: how to reconcile conservation, tourism and the rights of indigenous peoples in modern Botswana.
In the northeast of the Kalahari stretch the Makgadikgadi Pans, one of the largest salt flats in the world: a dazzling white plain, flat all the way to the horizon, which in the dry season looks like a frozen sea or the surface of another planet. They are the dried-up bed of a gigantic prehistoric lake, palaeolake Makgadikgadi, which thousands of years ago covered much of this region with fresh water and supported abundant life.
That vanished lake may also hold a place in the story of our species. A genetic study published in 2019 suggested that the Makgadikgadi-Okavango wetlands could have been one of the cradles of modern humans, an ancestral homeland from which our ancestors would have spread out. It's a hypothesis that scientists still debate, but it gives a sense of the depth of time this landscape holds.
Today the pans offer unique experiences: crossing them by quad bike, camping under a starry sky without a single artificial light, meeting colonies of meerkats used to people, or witnessing, in the rainy season, the arrival of flamingos and the zebra migration. In the middle of Sowa Pan rises Kubu Island, a granite outcrop crowned by ancient baobabs and considered a sacred place: it looks like a stone ship stranded forever in a white sea.
North of the great salt pans, Nxai Pan National Park protects a patchwork of ancient lake basins turned into grasslands dotted with acacias. In the rainy season, between December and April, its green plains host one of the most remarkable migrations in southern Africa: herds of zebra and wildebeest moving in search of fresh grass, closely followed by lions, cheetahs and other predators.
The great icon of Nxai Pan is Baines' Baobabs, a group of seven huge, ancient baobabs standing alone in the middle of the plain. They are named after the artist and explorer Thomas Baines, who painted them in 1862 during his travels through southern Africa; the astonishing thing is that his paintings, compared with the trees today, show they have barely changed in more than a century and a half, proof of the almost unimaginable longevity of these plant giants.
Together with the Makgadikgadi Pans, Kubu Island and the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, Nxai Pan completes the portrait of this region: Botswana at its driest, quietest and most vast, where the landscape is measured in horizons and time in millennia. It's the flip side of the lush Delta in the north, and no less mesmerising: the country boiled down to its essence of sand, salt, baobabs and sky.
Gaborone is one of the youngest capitals in Africa, and its history is closely bound to that of the nation itself. Throughout the protectorate era, Bechuanaland was, remarkably, governed from Mafeking, a town outside the territory, in South Africa. When independence became inevitable, a capital of its own had to be built from scratch.
The site chosen was a small settlement next to the railway station, near the village of Chief Gaborone, from whom it took its name. Between 1964 and 1965 a planned city went up in a rush, with its government buildings, and in 1965 it became the seat of internal self-government. On 30 September 1966, the flag of an independent Botswana was raised for the first time in Gaborone. The city then grew at a dizzying pace, from a few thousand inhabitants to a metropolis of several hundred thousand.
Today Gaborone —"Gabs" to the locals— is the political, administrative and economic heart of the country: home to the government, Parliament, the University of Botswana and the big diamond-related companies. On its doorstep, the Gaborone Game Reserve lets you see wildlife minutes from the centre. It's a calm, orderly capital, the symbol of a country that built itself, almost out of nothing, in just a few decades.
In Gaborone's financial district stands the Three Dikgosi Monument, three bronze statues of Khama III of the Bangwato, Sebele I of the Bakwena and Bathoen I of the Bangwaketse. They are the chiefs who travelled to England in 1895 to ask Queen Victoria and the Colonial Secretary to keep Bechuanaland under the Crown and not let it fall into the hands of Cecil Rhodes's company. Their diplomacy saved the territory from the worst of colonialism, and today they are honoured as founding fathers.
That monument sums up this region's role as Botswana's political heart. Here, in the country's southeast, are most of the population, the main historic villages of the great Tswana merafe and the institutions of the state. It's the most populated and developed part of Botswana, the one that looks towards South Africa and towards modernity.
The east was also where Botswana's young democracy took root: where Parliament and the national kgotla were set up, where diamond policy was debated and where, election after election, a multiparty system held firm that in 2024 saw its first peaceful handover of power between parties. From the three dikgosi's journey to the 2024 ballot boxes, this region is the thread running through the country's political history.
In the northeast of this region, Francistown is Botswana's second city and one of its oldest, with a past very different from the rest of the country. Its origins lie not in cattle or Tswana politics, but in gold. In the late 19th century, the discovery of deposits in the Tati River area set off one of the first gold rushes in southern Africa, and a town of prospectors, traders and adventurers grew up around the mines.
The town is named after Daniel Francis, a prospector who acquired mining concessions in the area in those years. The so-called Tati Concession was a peculiar enclave within the protectorate, with its own mining history that left an industrial, cosmopolitan stamp unusual for the region. Francistown became a railway and trading hub on the line linking South Africa with Rhodesia, a crossroads role it still keeps today.
Although gold never made it as rich as legend promised, Francistown kept its character as a frontier and transit town. Today it's an important commercial and industrial centre, a gateway to the east, to the Makgadikgadi Pans and to the border crossings with Zimbabwe, and it has a historic, hard-working feel that sets it apart from the more administrative Gaborone.
Eastern Botswana is the historic heartland of the Bangwato, the largest of the Tswana merafe, whose traditional capital is Serowe, one of the biggest villages in southern Africa. This royal house produced some of the country's key figures: Khama III, the Christian chief who travelled to England in 1895; his grandson Seretse Khama, Botswana's first president; and Seretse's son, Ian Khama, also president from 2008 to 2018. The history of the Bangwato and that of the nation are intertwined like those of no other people.
Near Serowe is the Khama Rhino Sanctuary, a community reserve created in 1992 to protect white and black rhinos, species that poaching had pushed to the brink of disappearing from the country. Run with the involvement of local communities, it has become one of the best places in Botswana to see rhinos up close and a model of community conservation in the spirit of Moremi.
At the far eastern end, where the Limpopo River marks the border and Botswana, South Africa and Zimbabwe meet, stretches the Tuli Block: a rugged strip of red-rock landscapes, rocky koppies, baobabs and riverine forest, with abundant, solitary wildlife. In colonial times it was an area of farms and concessions for settlers, and today it is home to private reserves where elephants, lions and leopards live in one of the wildest and least visited corners of the country. From the kingdom of the Bangwato to the Tuli, the east brings together much of Botswana's memory and nature.
Hardly anything that happened to Botswana happened on its own: these are the histories next door.
