Chiefs, and a journey to London
The Tswana chiefdoms — Bangwato, Bakwena, Bangwaketse, Batawana and others — governed the region for centuries, cattle-keeping states on the edge of the Kalahari, older than any of them the San, among the oldest human lineages on earth. In 1885 Britain declared a protectorate, chiefly to keep the Germans in the west and the Boers in the east apart.
When it looked as though the territory would be handed to Cecil Rhodes's company, three chiefs — Khama III, Sebele I and Bathoen I — sailed to Britain in 1895 and lobbied the public and the government directly. They won: the protectorate stayed a protectorate. It is one of the few times African rulers used the metropole's own politics against a chartered company and prevailed.
Seretse Khama, a marriage, and independence
Seretse Khama, heir to the Bangwato, married Ruth Williams, a white Englishwoman, in 1948 — an alliance apartheid South Africa found intolerable and Britain, unwilling to offend Pretoria, chose to punish. He was exiled from his own country for years. When he returned it was as a national politician, and in 1966 he became the first president of an independent Botswana.
At independence it was one of the poorest countries in the world, with a few kilometres of paved road. It had almost nothing anyone wanted. Then the geologists found the diamonds.
The diamond bargain
The first great pipe was found at Orapa in 1967, the year after independence. Rather than sign the country away, Khama's government built Debswana, a company owned fifty-fifty by the state and De Beers, and took a large share of the profits into the treasury. The pula, the currency, is named for rain — the thing a dry country prizes most — and diamond money was treated with something like the same care.
It was not spent on palaces. Botswana ran budget surpluses, built infrastructure and one of the better health and education systems in Africa, and became for decades the fastest-growing economy in the world. The comparison that matters is not with Switzerland but with its neighbours who found diamonds or oil and have little to show for it. Decades on, the government pressed De Beers to move its global rough-diamond sorting and sales out of London to Gaborone, which happened in 2013 — a rare case of an African producer capturing part of the trade's lucrative midstream.
The limits, and the handover
It is not a fairy tale. Botswana has one of the world's highest HIV prevalence rates and lived through a brutal AIDS crisis, though it was also among the first African states to provide free antiretrovirals at scale. The San of the central Kalahari were pushed off ancestral land in ways the courts later found unlawful. Diamonds are a narrow base, and the market's wobbles hit the whole budget.
The democracy was real but static: the Botswana Democratic Party held power from 1966 without a break. In October 2024 that ended. The party lost, and Duma Boko's opposition coalition took over in a calm, unremarkable transfer of power — which, in this region, is the remarkable part.