Shua

Shua, or Shwakhwe, is the eastern Kalahari Khoe speech of the foraging clans living around the great Makgadikgadi salt pans and the Nata River in present-day northeastern Botswana. The name itself means people of the salty place, and Shua is less one language than a cluster of named clan dialects.

Their herding ancestors entered Botswana in the early centuries of the Common Era and took up hunting and gathering as the Kalahari dried, moving with the seasons between the pans and the riverbanks, where the seasonal floods drew game and waterfowl.

By the 1700s Tswana-speaking Bakgalagadi agro-pastoralists had settled the better-watered fringes, and the Shua bands lived as hunters, clients and trading partners on the edge of a cattle economy, their click consonants leaving traces in the Bantu languages around them.