Tshwa

Tshwa, also written Tsoa or Tshuwau, is an East Kalahari Khoe dialect cluster including Kua and Hiechware, spoken by San bands across central Botswana and western Zimbabwe. Its Tjwao dialect is the only Khoisan speech native to Zimbabwe. The Hiechware label is shared with Shua speakers, showing how freely desert clans passed between dialect groups.

Like their Shua and Naro cousins, the Tshwa bands descend from Khoe-Kwadi herders who entered the region in the early centuries of the Common Era and became hunter-gatherers as the land dried, camping around the pans and dry riverbeds of the Gana country.

Their Tswana neighbors called them Sarwa, San clients attached to cattle-owning towns, where they traded game, skins and ostrich eggs. In the 1800s the ivory and ostrich-feather booms of Tswana and Kalanga trading centers drew their tracking skills into the commercial networks of the interior.