Botswana

The area was one of the poorest countries on Earth when it became independent from Britain in 1966, as the former Bechuanaland Protectorate. The discovery of diamonds soon after — at Orapa, then the vast Jwaneng mine — transformed it. Unusually, the wealth was managed carefully through a fifty-fifty partnership with De Beers, funding roads, schools, and clinics.

That gave Botswana decades of among the fastest growth rates in the world and a rare reputation for stable multiparty democracy and low corruption. The founding party governed from independence until 2024, when it lost an election for the first time and an opposition coalition took over peacefully.

The country still depends heavily on diamonds, and a recent slump in prices has strained the budget. Its other defining modern experience was the HIV/AIDS epidemic, devastating in the 1990s and 2000s and now largely controlled through a pioneering free treatment programme.

The majority are Tswana, organised historically into eight principal chiefdoms whose kgotla — a community assembly and court held under a tree, where decisions are talked through to consensus — is woven into local governance and the wider political culture. Minorities include the Kalanga, the Herero, whose women wear distinctive long dresses and horn-shaped headdresses, and the San, the region's first people and among the oldest continuous cultures on Earth, now largely settled and marginalised.

Society is fairly conservative and Christian-majority, with traditional beliefs alongside. Family cattle ownership carries deep cultural weight, and the seasonal harvest of mophane caterpillars is a genuine event.

Choral singing, the setapa dance, and a strong oral tradition anchor cultural life. Outside images of the country have been shaped by the writer Bessie Head and by the fictional Gaborone of the "No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency."

Around 2.6 million people live in a country the size of France, most of them in the wetter eastern strip near South Africa, in and around Gaborone, Francistown, and the larger villages. The Kalahari covers most of the rest, thinly grazed by cattle and goats.

The economy is built on diamonds, government, cattle, and tourism, and unemployment and inequality remain high despite the national wealth. Life in the villages turns on the kgotla, the church, the cattle post, and the farming year; Gaborone is a functional, fast-growing capital rather than a tourist city.

Maun and Kasane, on the edges of the great wildlife areas, live largely off safari tourism, with a transient population of guides, pilots, and lodge staff.

Everyday cooking is simple: bogobe or pap, a porridge of sorghum or maize, eaten with a relish of beef, goat, chicken, or wild greens (morogo). Seswaa — beef or goat boiled with little more than salt and pounded soft — is the celebratory national dish, served at weddings, funerals, and kgotla gatherings.

Other staples are dikgobe (samp and beans), madila (fermented milk), biltong, and mophane worms, dried or fried with onion and tomato as a protein-rich delicacy. Braai, the barbecue shared with South Africa, is the social meal.

In the safari camps, the food is international lodge fare. Chibuku, a commercial sorghum beer, and home-brewed bojalwa are the traditional drinks, alongside bottled lagers.

The Okavango Delta is the centrepiece: game drives on its islands and the classic mokoro glide through reed channels poled by a local guide, past red lechwe, elephant, and hippo, with lion, leopard, and wild dog in the surrounding Moremi Game Reserve. Scenic flights reveal the full maze of water and herds.

Chobe National Park in the north has some of the highest elephant densities in Africa, best seen from a boat on the Chobe River at sunset, and pairs easily with Victoria Falls across the border. The Makgadikgadi and Nxai salt pans offer a completely different landscape — quad-biking and walking on the cracked flats, habituated meerkats, giant baobabs, and, after the rains, flamingos and one of Africa's last big zebra migrations.

The Central Kalahari Game Reserve, one of the largest protected areas on Earth, holds desert-adapted wildlife and black-maned lions, spectacular after the rains. In the northwest, the Tsodilo Hills carry thousands of San rock paintings and are a place of deep spiritual significance.