Tswana

The Tswana, who call themselves Batswana and speak Setswana, are a Sotho-Tswana Bantu people of the southern African interior. Their cattle-keeping ancestors are estimated to have entered around 600 CE. The Toutswe chiefdom traded ivory, gold and rhinoceros horn along the Limpopo route for Asian beads until its decline around 1300.

Tswana chiefdoms, merafe, were ruled by dikgosi through councils and customary law. Kaditshwene, founded by the Bahurutshe in the late 1400s, had around ten thousand people by the early nineteenth century. Records in 1824 show the Bangwaketse under Makaba II as the dominant power. The difaqane drove armed migrants into Tswana lands, sacking settlements and prompting stronger centralized chiefdoms.

Europeans arrived then. Missionary Robert Moffat opened the Kuruman station in 1824, printing a Setswana spelling book and catechism in 1826 and the first Scripture passages in 1830.