"A nation without a past is a lost nation,
and a people without a past is a people without a soul."
Sir Seretse Khama, 1921 - 1980,
first President of the Republic of Botswana.
The origins of the Tswana tribes
In Botswana, about 1,000 years ago, large chiefdoms began to emerge in the area between Sowa Pan and the Tswapong Hills. Large settlements developed on hilltops. These people are known as the "Toutswe", after the first of their capitals, which was excavated on Toutswemogala Hill. Soon these communities were eclipsed by the Great Zimbabwe Empire, which spread its domain over much of eastern Botswana.
From around 1095 south-eastern Botswana saw the rise of a new culture, characterized by a site on Moritsane hill near Gabane, whose pottery mixed the old western style with new Iron Age influences derived from the eastern Transvaal (Lydenburg culture). The Moritsane culture is historically associated with the Khalagari (Kgalagadi) chiefdoms, the westernmost dialect-group of Sotho (or Sotho-Tswana) speakers, whose prowess was in cattle raising and hunting rather than in farming.
In east-central Botswana, the area within 80 or 100 kilometres of Serowe (but west of the railway line) saw a thriving farming culture, dominated by rulers living on Toutswe hill, between about 600-700 and 1200-1300. The prosperity of the state was based on cattle herding, with large corrals in the capital town and in scores of smaller hill-top villages. (Ancient cattleandsheep/goatcorrals are today revealed by characteristic grassgrowing on them.) The Toutswe people were also hunting westwards into the Kalahari and trading eastwards with the Limpopo. East coast shells, used as trade currency, were already being traded as far west as Tsodilo by 700.
From about 850 AD farmers from the upper Zambezi, ancestral to the Mbukushu and Yeyi peoples, reached as far south and west as the Tsodilo hills (Nqoma). Oral traditions tell of Yeyi farmers and fishermen scattering among the Khoesan of the Okavango delta in the early 18th century, like 'flies across a milk-pail'. The oral traditions of Mbukushu chiefs tell of migrations from the upper Chobe down the Okavango river later in the 18th century. These appear to have been responses to increased raiding in Angola for the Atlantic slave trade. The oral traditions of Herero and Mbanderu pastoralists, south-west of the Okavango straddling the Namibia border, relate how they were split apart from their Mbandu parent stock by 17th century Tswana cattle-raiding from the south.
The Toutswe state appears to have been conquered by its Mapungubwe state neighbour, centred on a hill at the Limpopo-Shashe confluence, between 1200 and 1300. Mapungubwe had been developing since about 1050 because of its control of the early gold trade coming down the Shashe, which was passed on for sale to sea traders on the Indian Ocean. The site of Toutswe town was abandoned, but the new rulers kept other settlements going - notably Bosutswe, a hill-top town in the west, which supplied the state with hunting products, caught by Khoean hunters, and with Khoesan cattle given in trade or tribute from the Boteti River.
But Mapungubwe's triumph was short-lived, as it was superceded by the new state of Great Zimbabwe, north of the Limpopo River, which flourished in control of the gold trade from the 13th to the 15th centuries. It is not known how far west the power of Great Zimbabwe extended. Certainly its successor state, the Butua state based at Kame near Bulawayo in western Zimbabwe from about 1450 onwards, controlled trade in salt and hunting dogs from the eastern Makgadikgadi pans, around which it built stone- walled command posts.
Around 1300 AD, peoples in present-day Transvaal began to coalesce into the linguistic and political groups they form today. This resulted in the emergence of three main groups: the Bakgalagadi, the Batswana and the Basotho, each of which had smaller divisions. Each group lived in small, loosely knit communities, spread widely over large areas of land. They spoke dialects of the same language and shared many cultural affinities.
Two central features of the history of the Batswana are fission and fusion. Groups of people broke off from their parent tribe and moved to new land, creating a new tribe and absorbing or subjugating the people they found there. This is how a single group of Batswana living in the Magaliesberg Mountains in northern Transvaal evolved into the numerous Tswana tribes, which exist today.
During the 1200-1400 period a number of powerful dynasties began to emerge among the Sotho in the western Transvaal, spreading their power in all directions. Fokeng chiefdoms spread southwards over Southern Sotho peoples, while Rolong chiefdoms spread westwards over Khalagari peoples. Khalagari chiefdoms either accepted Rolong rulers or moved westwards across the Kalahari, in search of better hunting and the desirable large cattle of the west. By the 17th century Rolong-Khalagari power stretched, as we have seen. as far as Mbandu country across the central Namibia- Botswana frontier. In the 1660's the military and trading power of the main Rolong kingdom at Taung (south of Botswana), in conflict with Kora groups of southern Khoi over copper trade, was known as far away as the new Dutch settlers at the Cape of Good Hope.
The main Tswana (Central Sotho) dynasties of the Hurutshe, Kwena and Kgatla were derived from the Phofu dynasty, which broke up in its western Transvaal home in the 1500-1600 period. Oral traditions usually explain these migrations as responses to drought, with junior brothers breaking away to become independent chiefs. The archeology of the Transvaal shows that the farming population was expanding and spreading in small homesteads, each clustered round its cattle corral, across open countryside - with a few larger settlements as evidence of petty chiefdoms. But after about 1700 the settlement pattern changed, with stone-walled villages and some large towns developing on hills - evidence of the growth of states often hostile to each other. These states were probably competing for cattle wealth and subject populations, for control of hunting and mineral tribute, and for control of trade with the east coast.
In 18th century further movements and split-ups of the Batswana resulted in the Tswana tribes which exist today: Bakhurutshe, Bangwato, Bakwena, Bangwaketse, Bakgatla, Batlhokwa, Barolong, Batlhaping and, much later, the Batawana.
The earlier farming inhabitants of Botswana - the Bakgalagadi - also split into several groups, namely the Bakgwateng, Babolaongwe, Bangologa, Baphaleng, Bashaga and many smaller groups. This then was how the Tswana tribes came to be living in Botswana as they were until about 1800. The Bechuanas had divided up within since the mid-18th Century, and comprised the Bahurutse, Bamangwato, Bakwena, Bangwaketse, Barolongs, Batlapins, and Batlaros. Each tribe had an animal as an emblem, or heraldic sign, which it was said they held in esteem.
The Butua state passed from the control of Chibundule (Torwa) rulers to Rozvi invaders from the north-east in about 1685. Under Rozvi rule, the common people of Butua became known as the Kalanga. The old Chibundule rulers appear to have fled to the western Kalanga (in the area now in Botswana), where they became known as Wumbe, giving rise to a number of local Kalanga chiefdoms. Other Kalanga chiefdoms descended from Mengwe, the 'uncle' of Chibundule, or from groups of Sotho attracted from the south such as the Nswazwi and Chizwina (Sebina) chiefdoms.
Kwena and Hurutshe migrants founded the Ngwaketse chiefdom among Khalagari-Rolong in south-eastern Botswana by 1700. After 1750 this grew into a powerful military state controlling Kalahari hunting and cattle raiding, and copper production west of Kanye. Meanwhile other Kwena had settled around Molepolole; and a group of those Kwena henceforth called Ngwato further north at Shoshong. By about 1770 a group of Ngwato, called the Tawana, had even settled as far north-west as Lake Ngami, in country occupied by Yeyi and previously frequented by Khalagari-Rolong and Kwena hunters and traders.
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