Ghanzi

Ghanzi grew up around a pan where cattle and game gathered for water, and San communities lived and hunted across this part of the Kalahari for thousands of years before any settlement existed. The area's pans and waterholes made it a meeting place on routes between the Okavango and the south.

European interest followed the cattle. The first substantial Afrikaner migration reached Ghanzi around 1897–1898, when trekkers took up farms on the ridge, and a scatter of remote ranches grew into a farming block that remained one of the most isolated parts of the Bechuanaland Protectorate. Supplies came by ox wagon and later by truck over sand; the district's people were separated from the east of the country by hundreds of kilometres of desert.

Ghanzi became the district's administrative centre, gaining offices, a hospital and schools after independence. The transformation came with boreholes, veterinary fences and the paving of the Trans-Kalahari Highway in the 1990s, which put Gaborone and the Namibian coast within a day's drive and turned a cattle outpost into a staging town. The same decades brought a long and contested resettlement of San communities from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve into villages such as New Xade to the east, a process a Botswana court ruled illegal in 2006, affirming the right to return to the reserve, and still argued over.

Ghanzi is one of the most mixed districts in Botswana. Naro and other San groups, Bakgalagadi, Batswana from the east and Afrikaans-speaking farming families live in the same small town, and Setswana, Naro, Afrikaans and English can all be heard in a morning on the main street. Ranch life shapes the calendar: branding, dipping, auctions and the constant work of boreholes and fences.

San cultural life has found an international audience through the art project at D'Kar, where painters and printmakers work in a style drawn from memory of the veld, and through the Kuru Dance and Music Festival, which brings groups from across the Kalahari together each August for trance dances, songs and games. Craft cooperatives in and around the town sell ostrich-eggshell beadwork, leather and baskets, and guided walks led by San trackers explain plants, snares and water-bearing roots.

Visitors are asked to approach these communities carefully. Much San craft and performance is presented for outsiders, while the everyday reality is one of poverty, land disputes and limited work, and the people themselves object to being treated as a spectacle. Beyond that, the ordinary Botswana courtesies hold: long greetings before business, respect for elders and the kgotla, and full churches on Sunday.

About 21,000 people lived in Ghanzi at the 2021 census, a small town by any measure but the largest settlement for hundreds of kilometres. Government is the main employer — the district administration, hospital, schools and police — followed by cattle, the shops and fuel stations that serve the highway, and a modest tourism trade based on the guest farms.

The rhythm follows the heat and the herds. Work starts early, the middle of the day is slow, and evenings on the veranda are long and cool. Households in town keep cattle at a post out in the sandveld, and a good rainy season is the difference between fat animals and a hard year. Water comes from boreholes, and drought and foot-and-mouth restrictions on beef exports hit the district hard when they come.

Outside town, ranches of several thousand hectares each employ small numbers of workers, many of them from San and Bakgalagadi families whose grandparents lived on the same land before it was fenced. Unemployment and alcohol are persistent problems, land and grazing rights are live political issues, and young people leave for Gaborone or the mines. What has improved is connection: a paved road, mobile coverage in the town, and a bus that can reach the capital in a day.

Ghanzi eats beef. The district raises cattle for the national herd, and meat is cheap, fresh and central: steaks and boerewors sausage over coals, stews with pap, and biltong dried in strips in every kitchen. Seswaa, salted beef boiled until it shreds and then pounded, appears at every wedding, funeral and public holiday, served with bogobe, the stiff sorghum or maize porridge that is the country's staple, and morogo greens.

The Kalahari itself supplies an older set of foods, gathered rather than farmed. The tsamma melon holds drinkable water in the driest months; morama beans are roasted for their nutty kernels; truffle-like fungi push up after heavy rain; and wild berries, tubers and gum from acacia trees have long supported San households. Some of these appear in markets in season, and guided bush walks from the guest farms explain how they are found.

Everyday town food is the same as elsewhere in Botswana: magwinya, the fried dough balls sold in the morning; takeaway plates of chicken, rice and coleslaw; and supermarket bread and maize meal. Chibuku sorghum beer in cartons, home-brewed bojalwa and South African lagers fill the bottle stores, and the Afrikaans farming families keep their own traditions of braai, potjiekos stewed in a three-legged pot and rusks with morning coffee.