Naro

The Naro, also written Nharo, were a San people of the western Kalahari, living in the Ghanzi country of Botswana and eastern Namibia. Their speech, a cluster of Tshu-Khwe dialects within the Khoe family, served as a trade language among the foraging bands of Ghanzi.

Like other Kalahari Khoe groups they traced their origins to herding communities that entered Botswana around the start of the Common Era and turned to hunting and gathering as the desert dried. Naro bands moved between seasonal waterholes, hunting with poisoned bows and arrows while women gathered berries, tubers and wild onions, and stored water in ostrich-egg shells through long droughts.

By the 1700s they shared the Ghanzi grasslands with the Bakgalagadi, Tswana-speaking agro-pastoralists whose spread made the San clients and hunters on the edges of a cattle-owning society.