8
P EOPLES
CULTURE AND CUSTOMS OF BOTSWANA AND
L ANGUAGES
Fossilized remains of some of the earliest ancestors of humankind, Australopithecines and Homo erectus, have been discovered in neighboring South Africa, so it is no surprise that stone tools covering more than 2 million years of human prehistory are common finds in Botswana as well. By 5,000 years ago, it is certain that the ancestors of present-day Khoisan-speaking peoples were the only inhabitants of the country. Today Botswana is a nation of more than 20 ethnic groups who speak languages belonging to two of the four major language families of Africa: Khoisan and the Bantu, a sub-branch of the Congo-Kordofanian family. The Bantu language Setswana, spoken as a first language by more than 80 percent of the population, is the dominant national language; English, which is widely spoken, is the official language used in government documents.2 The name “Botswana” means “the land of the Setswana-speaking peoples,” reflecting the fact that most inhabitants speak a dialect of Setswana as their mother tongue. More than 20 other Bantu languages are also spoken in Botswana. These can be divided into two linguistic subdivisions: eastern and western Bantu. Speakers of western Bantu languages live in the northwestern sandveld, west of the Okavango Delta. They include the Herero, Mbanderu, and Mbukushu, with relatives in Namibia and Angola, as well as the Yeyi, who live in the Okavango and the neighboring Caprivi Strip of Namibia. Eighteenth-century oral traditions describe the arrival of Yeyi farmers and fishermen among the Khoisan of the Okavango as being like “a scattering of flies across a milk-pail” as they migrated southward from the upper Chobe River region. In more recent times, this dispersion may have been a response to slave raiding in southern Angola, but the presence of clicks in the Yeyi language argues for longer-term interactions with Khoisan speakers. Archaeological finds of pottery and metal artifacts dating to the last half of the first millennium c.e. in the Tsodilo Hills west of the Okavango Delta suggest that many oral traditions, including those of the Yeyi and Mbukushu, may have telescoped a longer chronology of agropastoral occupation than is currently retained in historical memory. The Mbukushu and Yeyi are two of the few groups in Botswana that use corporate matrilineages. In such matrilineal societies, chieftainship is hereditary through the female line so that the chieftainship is passed to the chief ’s sister’s eldest son. Both groups are agriculturalists and fishermen whose chiefs, acting through their ancestors, are renowned for their rainmaking abilities. The oral traditions of Herero and Mbanderu pastoralists who live interspersed among the Mbukushu, Khoisan, and Tswana to the south and west of the Okavango and into Namibia relate how their split from the Mbandu