Culture and customs of botswana pdf

However, the extinction of traditional instruments in Botswana gained momentum in the years following independence, as the country rapidly urbanised[9]. Because traditional instruments were never mass-produced in Botswana, and therefore never standardised, each instrument needed to be constructed by a skilled craftsman usually the musician , who made it to suit his or her own taste and musical style.

Thus, each instrument was uniquely made using locally available materials. This tradition proved vulnerable to the effects of urbanisation, as older generations were not able to pass on these highly specialised skills to their children and grandchildren.

The availability of materials was also threatened by increased industrialisation[10]. An interesting case in point is the segaba , nicknamed the 'one-string violin'. Found throughout the country, it is estimated that at the time of independence, there were more than segaba players in Botswana. Although these numbers have declined drastically, compared to other traditional instruments, the segaba has managed to survive due to the relative simplicity of its construction. Encouragingly, there have been efforts made to preserve and revive traditional instruments in Botswana[11].

One significant initiative is the Botswana Music Camp, an annual workshop held since The camp draws participants from a variety of fields, such as music teachers, students, administrators and practicing musicians. It has played a significant role in teaching participants how to make, restore and play traditional instruments such as the segaba and the setinkane finger piano.

Held at local, regional and national levels, these popular music competitions have led to a revival for the segaba , setinkane and four-string guitar players across Botswana[12]. Finally, efforts have been made to notate the segaba to make it easier to teach in school curricula throughout the country, and small workshops have been established to produce these instruments and make them available to the next generation of Batswana musicians[13].

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If any track or video embedded on this platform violates any copyrights please inform us immediately and we will take it down. Please read our Terms of Use for more. Traditional music and instruments in Botswana. Six hundred miles of rail line along the eastern side of the country add to the transport infrastructure, while a digital telephone network links all but the most remote of villages.

As a counterpoint to the growth of urban centers, a second population trend has been the dispersal of people into parts of the country that were formerly uninhabited. This has been made possible with the drilling of deep boreholes that have allowed cattle posts to expand into the drier parts of the country. All villages with a population of more than are now connected to the national transportation grid.

Since independence, government expenditures to upgrade roads throughout the country reflect not only an emphasis on improving the economic infrastruc- ture of the country but also a reinforcement of cultural values as migration trends that have dispersed friends and family across widely spaced towns and villages are counterbalanced by the frequency with which people will travel sometimes large distances to visit.

It is not uncommon for young people to travel or miles over a long weekend to visit friends and relatives in other cities. Good roads, private bus services, and ubiquitous pay-per-destination hitchhiking all facilitate easy movement throughout the country.

According to figures from the U. Federal Highway Administration, in southern Africa had by far the highest rate of vehicle ownership in Africa. South Africa led with registered vehicles per 1, people, followed by Botswana with If one factors out the large and comparatively wealthy white population of South Africa, Botswana has a favorable business climate for the small entre- preneur.

This defensive driving school takes advantage of the fact that the country has one of the highest rates of car owner- ship per capita in Africa. The country also has one of the high- est automobile accident death rates on the continent, creating a demand for defensive driving schools.

In comparison, the highest rates of vehicle ownership in West Africa are found in Ghana, Nigeria, and Senegal, all with just 9 vehicles per 1, inhabitants.

The fatality rates for motor vehicle accidents in Botswana are also the highest on the continent, at 31 deaths per 1, people. In addi- tion to the district capitals, the other principal towns are Lobatse, Ghanzi, Palapye, and Tonota. Gaborone, the capital, was built from scratch in the s on British Crown land technically controlled by the queen. It was also chosen A view of central Gaborone with the Parliament building in the right foreground.

Laid out around the remains of a small colonial outpost that consisted of a fort, a prison, a post office, and expatriate housing, the small village has become one of the fastest-growing cities in the world and is now home to more than , people. New towns have also sprung up around mining ventures: Selibe-Phikwe, servicing the copper mine in Northeast district; Sowa city, the site of a soda ash mining plant on the Makgadikgadi pans; and the dia- mond towns of Orapa and Jwaneng.

All these centers have been the focus for in-migration from rural areas. These schools, which lasted for many months, taught young people the responsibilities of adult- hood, respect for elders and royalty, the virtues of obedience, and their rights and obligations in society. Traditional education included learning their his- tory through praise poems and the teaching of acceptable behavior through games, riddles, puzzles, and proverbs; the fundamentals of Tswana religious beliefs and cosmology were also discussed.

Livingstone built a small school in the s at his mission site at Kolobeng about 15 miles west of present- day Gaborone. As part of his missionary project, he, along with his father-in-law, Robert Moffat, translated the Bible into Setswana.

This was completed in Apart from first-millennium c. Christian texts in Ethiopia, this was the first translation of the Bible into a sub-Saharan African language. These included not only serfs and social outcasts but also second sons and junior elite who had little authority in the traditional political structure. As local evangelists were trained, mission schools expanded into other parts of the country. At the same time, the dikgosi generally made it their policy to allow only one missionary society to work in their ter- ritories because they or their missionary advisers feared the potential schisms that religious pluralism could bring.

From the first, there were also concerns that missionaries were undercutting the traditional bases of Tswana society, which rested on spiritual as well as material foundations. Because of the Protes- tant orientation of early British missionaries with the London Missionary Soci- ety and, slightly later, the Hermannsburg Lutherans, the Roman Catholic Church did not gain a foothold in the country until the s, when a Catholic mission was opened at Kgale Hill outside Gaborone.

This school has produced a number of prominent leaders of Botswana, including the former vice president, the late Peter Mmusi. English is the recommended medium of instruction from Standard 2 second grade onward. While this accounts for a high literacy rate in Botswana, it is also true that access to pri- mary education remains difficult for many who live in remote villages and cattle posts.

In these areas, parents have to send their children to larger towns and villages for schooling. As a result, in rural areas a significant number of people still cannot read or write. After completing Standard 7 and passing a national exam with English and Tswana components, students are awarded a Standard 7, or Primary School Leaving Examination, Certificate.

Admission to secondary school education was for- merly dependent on the pass level of a student on the Standard 7 exam. More recent initiatives have resulted in automatic promotion through Form 3, which the government has now set as the basic standard of education for every student. The secondary school system is divided into two tiers.

The first, Junior Secondary School, generally takes three years, after which a Junior Certificate exam is taken. Results on this standardized exam control access to a Senior Secondary School where the last two years of education are taken.

At inde- pendence, there were seven secondary schools in the country that accommo- dated both Junior and Senior Certificate General Certificate of Education students.

At completion of their secondary school education, students must pass the Botswana General Certificate of Secondary Education as a prerequisite for admission to the university. There are a number of training opportunities open to secondary school graduates who do not go on to university. These include vocational training Primary-grade schoolchildren in their school uniforms lining up to wash their hands at one of the school taps.

A typical class- room is in the background. Entry requirements consist of a minimum of a C pass on the Junior Certificate plus working experience in the area to be studied. Brigade centers in many parts of the country offer additional educational opportunities in trades such as agriculture, auto mechanics, building, and carpentry. These courses are especially useful for individuals whose Junior Certificate results prevent them from attending a senior secondary school.

One- year postgraduate diplomas are offered in secondary education, library and information sciences, and education counseling. Doctoral degrees are available in higher education and are under review for some other fields.

University education is in practice free for qualified citizens, with the current student body almost equally divided between men and women. Botswana supports a number of nonformal education efforts, including the National Literacy Program initiated in The adult literacy rate is now approximately 70 percent, with women scoring slightly higher than men. Other programs include distance education initiatives to enable stu- dents and citizens with special needs to participate in Junior Certificate, Gen- eral Certificate of Education, and Special Education programs so that they can become productive members of society.

As a result, the livestock sector has always dominated the agricultural economy because herds are more resilient to the droughts that affect the country with regularity. Although dia- monds and copper now dominate the export economy, cattle are still impor- tant economically as a store of wealth and a source of milk, meat, and hides for most of the population. Europe has been one of the important importers of Botswana beef, which picked up in the s as abattoirs were opened in Lobatse, Maun, and Francistown.

One of the major constraints to cattle export has been periodic outbreaks of foot-and-mouth disease that have required strong measures, including continuously manned cordon fences that stretch across the country, to control it.

The agricultural sector still provides the largest source of jobs in the country not only for farmers and herders but also for veterinarians, abattoir workers, and retailers. Unreliable rainfall and growing job opportunities in other sectors of the economy have impacted the agricultural sector, and there is some evidence that subsistence farming is on the decline. With the opening of the diamond mines in Central District in , the wealth-generating sector of the economy has shifted from agropastoralism to the mining sector, which now accounts for about 70 percent of export reve- nues.

The country is now the largest exporter of gem-quality diamonds in the world, with an annual output of well over 17 million carats. Other minerals that occur in economic quantities include copper, nickel, and soda ash.

Recent statistics indicate that tourism is now the third-highest foreign rev- enue earner after mining and cattle. A large part of this revenue is generated from within southern Africa, as tourists from South Africa and Botswana have begun to take advantage of the easier access to wildlife areas afforded by improved roads, lodges, safe water supplies, and other infrastructure.

Tourists are able to enjoy a variety of experiences that include photographic as well as hunting and trophy safaris. More than 27, people are now directly employed in the tourism industry, which generates 70 percent of the jobs in rural areas where other sources of work and income are scarce. Although the government is largely responsible for the promotion and advertising of the industry, these costs are being increasingly shared by the private sector, which manages a number of private safari companies and wildlife reserves.

Attractions such as the rock art at Tsodilo and medieval stone-walled ruins belonging to the Zimbabwe cul- ture increasingly draw tourists interested in culture as well as those interested in wildlife and nature. Large towns were divided into segments called wards, which represented the major ethnic and family divisions within the community.

Each segment usually arranged its houses around a central animal corral kraal, lesaka situated in front of the most senior homestead. These segments were in turn grouped around the most senior kgotla, that of the kgosi king.

The kgotla, symbolized by a semicircular fence of stout, upright logs, sometimes topped by skulls of cattle or, in the case of Shoshong, a rhinoceros skull, was located next to the central animal kraal. In the past, with some exceptions e. Subservient peoples, such as the Kgalagadi and Sarwa, had no right to voice an opinion or to take part in important deci- sions. Because women were often the de facto heads of households in communities where migrant labor opportunities attracted men to South Africa for work, their exclusion from the traditional kgotla system of governance impacted develop- ment work in the community.

The kgotla, identified by its semicircle of upright posts, is the political center of every Tswana community. While women may now attend these meetings, men still attend in larger numbers, organizing and seating themselves by seniority and age. In all these cases, freedom of expression was respected, and there was no punishment for criticizing the highest government official.

At the conclusion of every kgotla meeting or pitso, the national cry Pula, Pula can be heard echoing through the community. It is also the principal national unit of currency and is often used as a toast.

Many of the postcolonial structures put in place had the effect of democratizing local government while at the same time reducing the powers of traditional, nonelected authorities such as the dikgosi, whose powers are now exercised mainly in local, customary courts still located at the kgotla. The executive branch of the government includes the president, who is head of state, and a cabinet composed of ministers appointed from members of the National Assembly or Parliament.

The executive branch has control of gov- ernment ministries and departments staffed by civil servants who implement government policy. Each political party selects its own president, who auto- matically becomes president of Botswana, after endorsement by the National Assembly, if his party wins the general election. The president has the power to appoint the secretary of the cabinet, known as the permanent secretary to the president, the speaker of the Parliament, and permanent secretaries who head the day-to-day affairs of ministries charged with specific administrative and developmental responsibilities.

The president may dissolve Parliament; he may also appoint the chief justice and the commander of the Botswana Defense Force. The National Assembly, which includes the president, is the supreme law- making body.

It is composed of 40 members of parliament, one from each of the elective constituencies in the country; an additional four members are specially elected and include the attorney general and the speaker. All citizens older than the age of 18 may vote, provided they are of sound mind and have not been imprisoned for more than six months. In recent changes, the Kalaka Kalanga are now represented, but other groups, such as the Yeyi in the Okavango, continue to lobby for representation.

One of the first changes was made with the District Councils Act of , which established district councils composed of elected representatives.

Other offices set in place under the DC include the District Land Boards, estab- lished in and headed by the District Officer for Lands, and the District Officer of Development, a post established in Almost all the district land boards are named after the dominant political faction in each district; for instance, the Ngwato Land Board in Serowe oversees the land affairs for Cen- tral District.

These councils have taken over almost all the traditional functions of chieftainship, including authority to collect and dispose of stray cattle, one of the traditional sources of revenue for chiefs during the precolonial and colonial eras.

Botswana has had three presidents since independence, each of them appointed through a peaceful democratic process of elections; since , terms of office are for five years, with a limit of two terms. At election time, impassioned candidates or their representatives roar out their platforms and merits through bullhorns. Voter turnout is high, with 77 percent of registered voters participating in the election. The Independent Electoral Commission administers elections, but opposition parties argue that this is not a nonpartisan body for two rea- sons.

First, it is housed in government offices and funded by the Botswana government, which is dominated by the Botswana Democratic Party. Second, the president appoints the commissioner. In some areas, such as the Makgadikgadi salt pans, the fos- silized remains of prehistoric animals, some now extinct, can be found along with hand axes and spear points belonging to the Early and Middle Stone Ages that date between 2 million and 30, years ago.

In more recent times, Botswana has become well known in the West as the home of some of the last peoples to supposedly subsist almost entirely by hunting and gathering—the Sarwa or Bushmen. Indeed, the first transitions from hunting and gathering to herding began in the Kalahari almost 2, years ago as the ancestors of some Sarwa began to acquire herds of sheep and cattle of their own.

This processes accelerated after c. Early Chiefdoms and Kingdoms Between and c. As herds expanded, so did opportunities for some lineages to increase their political support by using cattle to make favorable marriages and political alliances as well as to attract followers by lending out animals in a system called mafisa; some Sarwa may also have been recruited to help with herd management.

By the end of the first millennium c. The introduction of trade goods from the Indian Ocean that included glass beads from India and chickens, with an ultimate origin in Indonesia, further enhanced social stratification after c.

In exchange, elephant ivory and other veld products were sent down the Limpopo valley to the Indian Ocean. Initially, exploitation of local resources, including specularite, a form of hematite that was mixed with fat to make a sparkling hair dressing, along with iron and copper, linked emerging chiefdoms in the northern Kalahari with those on the eastern side of the country.

Around c. Political restructuring followed as new polit- ical alignments were created in response to the rise of Great Zimbabwe as a regional power. Families associated with the important sites of Mapungubwe, in the Limpopo valley, and Great Zimbabwe replaced the elite at older chiefly settlements, such as Bosutswe and Toutswe in Botswana. In the Northeast district around Francistown, many other stone-walled centers were built in the Zimbabwe pattern.

The ruins follow a Zimbabwe plan of circular stone walls surrounding the houses of the elite; most contain graphite-burnished pottery and other commodities associated with Zimbabwe hegemony. These ruins, which run from the Motloutse River west to the Makgadikgadi pans, attest to the dominance of Kalanga-speaking peoples in this region between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries.

Yet these settlements undoubtedly served as a political and economic focus for a broader spectrum of peoples, both Bantu and Khoisan. Further south, the ancestors of the Kalanga- and Tswana-speaking peoples responded differently to the stimuli of outside trade and political competition by maintaining greater autonomy from Zimbabwe power. This is reflected in different styles of pottery and stone ruins.

Drying climates after c. West of the Makgadikgadi, an earlier chiefdom in the Tsodilo Hills of northwestern Ngamiland controlled extensive specularite mines, but this chiefdom collapsed around c.

Increased demand for gold after its discov- ery around c. In addition to iron, copper, and gold, bronze also began to be manufactured and worn by regional subelite.

While a few glass beads and marine shells have been recovered from archaeological excavations here, the political economy seems to have been less impacted by this trade. Instead, the Iron Age Tswana communities in this region continued an earlier cattle-centric focus with frequent competition and raiding between communities. Many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century villages were therefore built in defensive positions on hilltops that were surrounded by defensive stone walls.

The lay- out of these communities parallels the later Tswana pattern of housing clusters built in a semicircle around central animal kraals where the kgotla would also have been situated.

The reasons for this turmoil are diverse and include both indigenous and European factors. But the end result was a redistribution of peoples whose ultimate origins lie in South Africa. While historical memory resonates with the terror of these raids, they had a much less lasting effect on the peoples and cultures of Botswana than the more pervasive set of influences that followed the incursions of white missionaries, traders, adventurers, and settlers.

Missionaries, Hunters, and Adventurers As part of a project to stem Boer advancement into the interior as well as to save souls, the London Missionary Society under Robert Moffat estab- lished a mission station and school in the s at Kuruman, just outside the border of modern Botswana. Sechele, the chief of the Kwena on whose land Livingstone had settled, was his first convert.

I can make them do nothing except by threatening them; if you like, I shall call my head men, and with our rhinoceros- hide whips we shall soon make them believe all together. While at Kolobeng, Livingstone began correspondence with friends in England to help him pro- duce a plow that would be strong enough to till the hard soil of Botswana. During his absence from Kolobeng in , the Boers destroyed the mission station. This, the subsequent death of his wife in , and the fact that he clearly preferred exploring to preaching and conversion led him to abandon the station and embark on wider missionary explorations into the interior of Africa.

In the last half of the nineteenth century, lured by the profits and adventure to be made by supplying the elephant ivory and ostrich feathers in demand in Victorian salons and Western saloons, Europeans began to enter the country in increasing numbers. They included Cotton Oswall, a sometime traveling com- panion of Livingstone, along with explorers and traders such as Thomas Baines, Charles James Andersson, Frederick Green, James Chapman, and others who left no journals to record their exploits or ensure their memory.

In , David Francis negotiated mining rights in northeastern Botswana with King Lobengula of the Ndebele, and in a town named after him became a railhead on the Cape-to-Bulawayo railway.

Pleas to the British government for protec- tion by Tswana chiefs and resident expatriate missionaries fell on deaf ears, however, until the German acquisition of South West Africa Namibia under the Treaty of Berlin in Almost immediately afterward, in , the British government declared protection over Botswana lands lying between the Molopo River in the south and 22 degrees south latitude.

In , protec- tion was extended north to 18 degrees south latitude, incorporating the region covered by present-day Botswana. While one incentive for this action was to block further expansion of German power in southern Africa, another factor was the desire to capture Bechuanaland as a reservoir to supply the growing demand for labor in the diamond and gold mines of South Africa.

Britain had no desire to spend money on the protectorate, and by plans were under way to transfer the administration of the territory to the privately held British South Africa Company BSAC managed by Cecil Rhodes. Lloyd and W. Willoughby, traveled to Britain to peti- tion in person against the transfer. At the same time, Cecil Rhodes, then prime minister of the British Cape Colony, was plotting to support a rebellion of English-speaking residents against the Afrikaans-speaking Boer Republic of the Transvaal under Paul Krueger.

In , a secret raid from Rhodesia through Botswana by a band of British adventurers, led by Starr Jameson, was launched that was intended to coincide with an uprising of the English-speaking Uitlanders in Johannesburg.

As a result, the Bechuanaland Protec- torate was the only colonial territory in the world whose administrative center, Mafikeng, lay outside its boundaries. A system of parallel or indirect rule was developed that left African kings to rule their own people, but their powers to tax, conduct trials and wars, and other matters were either eliminated or closely regulated by the resident mag- istrate.

The result was inexpensive administration for the British while leaving African authori- ties under the inaccurate impression that they maintained control over their own affairs. But Botswana received only a fixed 2 percent share of Customs Union revenues right up to and beyond independence in Otherwise, the territory was left to fend for itself as a poor, sandy wasteland with no resources of note other than to serve as a labor pool for its wealthier South African neighbor.

While distanced neglect on the part of its resident commissioners and the British government might have meant that, at least in material terms, there was little change from the precolonial to colonial periods, European domi- nance did result in many profound changes in Botswana society. The eco- nomics of agriculture, for instance, were transformed as plows and oxen were introduced into agricultural production, perhaps facilitating in some small way the abandonment of polygyny.

Many times, these were younger sons with little claim to wealth and status in the traditional economy but who returned home with a greater abil- ity to challenge traditional structures and purchase cattle in their own right. Finally, Christianity was grafted onto an embedded structure of traditional belief and practice, resulting in profound changes in the cosmology and worldview of many Tswana. Independence Movements The emergence of formal political parties to voice dissatisfaction with British rule emerged only in the late s with the establishment of the short-lived Bechuanaland Federal Party under Leetile Raditladi.

What was then viewed as the radi- cal stance of this party among more conservative Tswana led to the formation of the Bechuanaland Democratic Party BDP in under the leadership of the Ngwato Kgosi, Sir Seretse Khama. Although Sir Seretse had come under political and social criticism among some of his followers, as well as segments of British society, for marrying an English woman, the BDP enjoyed the sup- port of the colonial administration.

While Parliament is still dominated by the Botswana Democratic Party, representatives of the major opposition party, the BNF, won 13 of 40 seats in The elections of , however, reversed those gains, and the Botswana Democratic Party now controls 33 seats, with those of the BNF falling to six.

The Botswana Congress Party currently has one seat. C ULTURAL I SSUES Because almost 80 percent of the population are the descendants of the Tswana-speaking nations that began to fragment in the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries, with another 11 percent being Kalanga, on the one hand there is a kind of homogeneity of cultural beliefs and customs in the country.

Yet at the same time, there are sometimes wide differences between Tswana customs and beliefs and those of the smaller, minority merafe, who make up the remaining 9 percent i.

This produces a social context with ample opportunities for cultural arbitrage. All but the smallest of communities in Botswana are multiethnic, and historical and archaeological evidence indicates that this has been the case for hundreds if not thousands of years. In the northwest of the country, Tswana, Herero, Mbukushu, and Yeyi are intermixed with one another and with Khoisan speakers in almost every community.

One of the results is that multilingual fluency is common, as is knowledge of differing cultural beliefs. The system of governance that Botswana has evolved from the pluralistic roots of the traditional kgotla and the social mechanisms to cope with the multiethnic context of even the smallest of Botswana communities appears robust enough to work with such ongoing historical realities while providing protections for the freedom of speech of minority groups.

This respect for democracy, perhaps as much as the numerical dominance of the Tswana, has shaped the oldest and most stable democratic government in Africa.

As one author summarizes the current dilemma, The terms minority and majority have, by definition, no numerical significance in Botswana. For instance, the Bakalaka are believed to be the largest tribe in the Central District, and yet they are regarded as a minority tribe because they speak Ikalanga, which is not related to Setswana.

By contrast, the Batawana constitute one per cent of the population and yet the former are regarded as a minority tribe and the latter as a majority tribe.

The government does not recognise the Wayeyi Paramount Chief. The Balete and Batlokwa have small populations occupying one vil- lage, and yet they are regarded as majority tribes and are represented by their Paramount Chiefs in the House of Chiefs. The general pattern is that Setswana speaking groups rule over all the non-Setswana tribes.

Minority languages and cultures are suppressed and their use in public domains is discouraged. These policies are meant to foster national unity and a national cultural identity. They are congruent with an assimilationist model and are underpinned by an orientation that views linguistic and cultural diversity as a problem and a threat to national unity.

This is true of all Tswana spelling. The orthography for various consonantal clicks in the Sarwa or Khoisan lan- guages and some Bantu languages varies. Citation Type. Has PDF. Publication Type. More Filters. The continent of Africa is rich with rhetorical traditions that remain largely unexamined.

Signs and Society. The missionary encounter between the London Missionary Society and Sotho-Tswana communities of southern Africa has been explored by Jean and John Comaroff as work that took place at the level of both … Expand.

Urban youth and their creative energies form part of the discourse of urbanization in Africa. Their participation in reconstructing, accessing, and animating the African urban landscape is evident in … Expand. View 1 excerpt, cites background. Conserving and Sustaining Culture through Traditional Dress. The government of Botswana through its National Policy on Culture and the National Ecotourism Strategy is committed to preserving national culture and historical heritage.

The policy … Expand. Highly Influenced. View 6 excerpts, cites background. Nata This is where all social, judicial and political affairs of the community are discussed and dealt with. Today, while most of the homesteads in the rural villages are built using modern fabricated materials of some sort, the kgotla and cattle posts remain integral to the stability of these communities.

Maize porridge papa, to the locals and boiled fish are the staple foods in and around the Okavango Delta. Cattle, and to a lesser extent goats and sheep, have always played an important social and economic role within Batswana society. Animal husbandry was central to the survival and success of most groups , other than the Basarwa and Bayei. Cattle in particular are kept, not only for food and clothing, but also as a measure of wealth.

The larger their herd's size the greater the influence an individual or family has within the community. Cattle are also traditionally used as the primary means of exchange.

Disputes and punishments handed down by the kgotla were settled with payments of cattle, and men paying their bogadi bride price would deliver cattle to the woman's family.

Cattle still retain a prominent place in rural Botswana, and for many the herd remains the preferred store of wealth.

The occurrence of totems is common throughout Africa, and indeed the world. While some groups have non-animal totems, most within Botswana have animals as their group or community totem.