Badimo

Badimo, Sotho-Tswana for ancestors, is the ancestor veneration of the Sotho-Tswana peoples of what are now Botswana, Lesotho and South Africa. Sotho and Tswana are thought to have separated by the fourteenth century, and both kept the veneration of the dead at the centre of religious life.

The Badimo are not simply the dead but the living dead, who dwell in the underworld and punish those who displease them. Each year before the first rains, a delegation took brewed beer and a slaughtered beast to the hills where the Badimo were thought to hide and brought back their expectations.

From 1822 Moshoeshoe I gathered refugees of the difaqane into the Basotho kingdom, while Robert Moffat opened the Kuruman mission among the Tswana in 1824. Christianity did not fully displace the Badimo, which survived beside it.