Botswana

The Kalahari covers most of Botswana, a basin of red and grey sand under thornbush and grass. In the north-west the Okavango, flowing down from the highlands of Angola, fans out into the sand, a tangle of channels, lagoons and islands. Its floodwater arrives in the dry winter, long after the rains that sent it. To the east lie the white Makgadikgadi salt pans, and along the Chobe in the far north herds of elephants gather at the water.

San hunters painted thousands of images on the rocks of the Tsodilo Hills, and Tswana chiefdoms later settled the eastern grasslands. Britain declared the Bechuanaland Protectorate in 1885, and ten years later three chiefs, Khama III, Sebele and Bathoen, sailed to London and persuaded the government not to hand their land to Cecil Rhodes’s company. Seretse Khama, exiled for marrying an Englishwoman, became the first president at independence in September 1966. Diamonds were found at Orapa the next year.

The kgotla, an open assembly where villagers and elders debate in public, has long shaped decisions from the village to the nation. Cattle are the traditional measure of a family’s standing, and seswaa, beef boiled and pounded with salt, is served at weddings and funerals. Bessie Head wrote her novels in Serowe. Diamonds from Jwaneng and Orapa, mined by Debswana, a partnership of the government and De Beers, pay for much of the state; beef, soda ash and Okavango safaris bring in the rest.