Sotho-Tswana

The Sotho-Tswana group includes the Sotho, Tswana and Lozi. Their ancestors reached Botswana and the highveld about AD 200—500, and by the fifteenth century they were spreading across the southern Transvaal and forming new chiefdoms. They kept totem clans and lived in round huts with conical thatched roofs.

Tswana chiefdoms were ruled by dikgosi with advisory councils and built large towns: Kweneng, a settlement of the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries, and Kaditshwene, the cultural capital of the Bahurutshe, with some 10,000 people. The Lozi kingdom arose in the seventeenth century on the Zambezi floodplain, and about 1830 the Sotho Makololo under Sebetwane invaded and conquered it.