Khwe

The Khwe, also rendered Kxoe or Khwedam, are a San people of the Okavango Delta and the western Caprivi, whose traditional lands reach into Angola, Zambia and Botswana. Their traditions place their ancestors around the Tsodilo Hills. They lived in small semi-nomadic bands without chiefs, moving with the game and seasonal waterholes, and left their mark in the rock art of the Tsodilo Hills.

As Bantu-speaking herders and farmers spread through the region up to the year 1000, the Khwe traded and intermingled with them, and the clicks of their Khoe speech were absorbed into neighbouring Bantu languages.

While Dutch trekboers and their commandos destroyed San bands around the Cape frontier from 1714 to the 1790s, the Okavango country lay far beyond colonial reach, and the Khwe kept their foraging life there undisturbed.