Botswana and Southern Africa before colonial rule
Pre-colonial southern Africa is a topic in its own right - society, economy, politics and the evidence used to reconstruct them.
Peoples and economies: San hunter-gatherers; Khoikhoi pastoralists; Bantu-speaking farmers who spread through the region in the first millennium CE, bringing iron working, sorghum, millet and cattle. By the second millennium, mixed farming supported larger communities, long-distance trade in copper, ivory and gold, and politics such as Mapungubwe and Great Zimbabwe, linked to Indian Ocean commerce.
Tswana political society: the morafe (chiefdom or state) was organised into wards under headmen, with a kgotla (public assembly and court) and bogosi (chiefly authority). Mephato (age regiments) mobilised labour and defence; cattle measured wealth and bound patrons to clients through loaning. Rainmaking, marriage alliances and cattle shaped authority.
Evidence: archaeology (settlement patterns, cattle dung, iron, imported trade goods), oral tradition (genealogies, praise poetry, founding narratives) and later written accounts by traders, hunters and missionaries - each with distinct limits.
Traps: the 'empty land' myth, which served to justify colonial takeover; reducing the difaqane/Mfecane to simple Zulu violence rather than a complex, still-debated regional upheaval; using 'Botswana' before 1966 as though it were a state; assuming societies without written records lacked organisation.
Rule of thumb: never state a pre-colonial 'fact' without naming the type of evidence behind it, and say what that evidence cannot show.
Worked example: 'Pre-colonial Botswana was empty and disorganised.' Answer: archaeological sequences show centuries of Iron Age settlement; oral traditions and early nineteenth-century visitors describe wards, kgotla debate and regiments. The claim reflects colonial convenience, not evidence.