Francistown

Francistown owes its existence to gold. Workings in the Tati district, the country between the Shashe and Ramokgwebana rivers, had been mined long before Europeans arrived, and when prospectors confirmed the reefs in the 1860s a rush followed — often described as the first in southern Africa. A concession was granted over the district, and the town was founded in 1897 near the Monarch mine and named after Daniel Francis, an English prospector who held licences in the district and was a director of the Tati Concessions Company.

The railway from South Africa to Bulawayo arrived in the same years and fixed its future. Gold mining was never as rich as hoped and faded in and out through the 20th century, but the rail line, the road and the position near the Rhodesian border made Francistown a trading and transport town, with a small, tightly held commercial class and a working population drawn from the surrounding Kalanga villages.

Under the Bechuanaland Protectorate it was the territory's largest town for a period, and from the 1930s to the 1980s it was a recruiting and transit point for the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association, which moved workers by rail and air to the mines of South Africa. After independence the mines and industries of the central district — Selebi-Phikwe's copper and nickel, the diamond mines at Orapa and Letlhakane, the soda-ash plant at Sowa — made it their supply base, and it became the commercial capital of northern Botswana, with warehousing, wholesalers and cross-border trade at its core.

Francistown is the centre of Kalanga Botswana. Ikalanga, a language related to Shona, is spoken widely in the city and the villages of the North East alongside Setswana, and there is a sustained effort to keep it in use through choirs, radio, writing and the annual festival at the Domboshaba ruins, where Kalanga dance, dress and food are celebrated each year. Tswana, Babirwa and Zimbabwean communities live alongside, and many families have relatives on both sides of the border.

Weekend nights are lively along the main strips, where bars and halls put on live music. Football is followed closely: Francistown has several long-established clubs and grounds of its own, and matches draw crowds from the villages around the city.

Customs are those of the wider region and taken seriously: long greetings before any business, respect for elders, modest dress, and full churches on Sunday. Funerals are large, lengthy community affairs, and many city residents keep strong ties to a home village and a cattle post, returning at weekends and at Christmas. The kgotla still functions in the villages that the city has grown towards.

About 103,000 people lived in Francistown at the 2022 census, making it Botswana's second city and by far the largest place in the north. Its economy is trade and services: wholesalers, hardware and transport firms, shopping centres, banks, hospitals, colleges and the government offices of the district, with mining and agriculture supplying custom rather than jobs inside the city itself.

The border shapes daily life. Goods, buses and traders move constantly between the city and Zimbabwe through Ramokgwebana, and a large Zimbabwean community lives and works here, sending money and supplies home. Trucks on the A1 and the rail line keep the industrial edge of town busy through the night, while the centre is a daytime place, emptying after the shops close.

Residents live mostly in single-storey houses on serviced plots in districts that have spread north and west as the city has grown, with newer estates on the outskirts. Water supply, drawn from the Shashe Dam since 1982, is a recurring worry in dry years, and unemployment, especially among young people, is the constant local complaint. The closure of the copper-nickel mine at nearby Selebi-Phikwe in 2016 was felt in the city's trade, and the region's economy has been looking for replacements since.

Francistown sits in mophane woodland, and phane — the caterpillars of the mophane emperor moth, gathered after the rains, gutted, boiled and dried — is the food most associated with the city. It is sold by the cup and by the sack in the markets, fried with onion and tomato, stewed, or eaten dry as a snack, and the harvest is an important seasonal income for rural households across the North East.

Otherwise the staples are the country's: bogobe, the stiff sorghum or maize porridge, with beef stew, goat or morogo greens; seswaa, salted beef pounded soft, at every gathering; dikgobe, samp cooked with beans; and madila, soured milk. Kalanga households keep their own dishes and their own names for them, and the wetter east grows more maize, beans, groundnuts and melons than the Kalahari districts to the west. Marula fruit is eaten fresh in late summer and brewed into a sweet, lightly alcoholic drink.

Street and roadside food is a genuine part of the city: magwinya, the fried dough balls sold from early morning; grilled meat and roasted maize cobs along the A1; and takeaway plates of chicken, rice, beans and coleslaw around the ranks. The shopping centres hold South African chains and grill houses, and the bars serve Chibuku sorghum beer in cartons alongside bottled lagers.