The capital had to move inside the country

Gaborone is a capital that had to exist because the colonial seat was not in the country. The protectorate was administered from outside. The independent state built its capital inside its own territory only then.

Botswana lies in southern Africa with no seacoast, between Namibia, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe. On 582,000 square kilometres live 2,562,122 people. The capital stands in the south-east, close to the border with South Africa, on the line that ties the country to that neighbour and onward to Zimbabwe. The west and the centre are mostly Kalahari. The state is large and thinly settled, and its political centre is young on purpose.

Mafeking lay on the wrong side of the border

Before independence the territory was called Bechuanaland and was a protectorate of the United Kingdom. The administrative seat was not in a town of the protectorate. It was in Mafeking, in what is now South Africa, beyond the border that separated the territory from the Cape and later from the Union of South Africa. A state administered from outside has officials. It does not yet have a capital that belongs to it.

With independence in 1966 the seat moved inside the country. Gaborone was built for that purpose, close to the border, to water and to the railway, not in the middle of the Kalahari. The choice was practical. It was also a political statement: the capital of an independent state cannot remain in another state. Gaborone is therefore not an old royal city that grew into the role. It is the address the country gave itself when it stopped being governed from Mafeking.

Kalahari, Okavango and the settled east

Most of the area is dry. The Kalahari fills the west and the centre, and settlement shifts east, to where the railway runs and where South Africa and Zimbabwe are the neighbours. Gaborone stands in that hem, not at the geometric centre. Take the capital for the middle of the country and you confuse the political address with the centre of the area. The area is sand and thorn. The address is the edge where the country meets the more crowded neighbours.

In the north-west a river ends without reaching the sea. The Okavango runs into an inland delta and disappears into the country. That is the counter-image of the missing coast: water comes in and stays, instead of forming a border with the ocean. On the Zambezi at Kazungula, Botswana touches Zambia, in addition to the long borders with Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe. Four neighbours, a river delta with no mouth, a capital on the south-eastern edge. That is what a landlocked state looks like when it does not take its centre from geometry.

A capital beyond the border does not yet belong to the country. Gaborone is the correction.

— TerraTally · Countries desk

Pula, English and Setswana

English is the official language, Setswana the national language. English is the inheritance of the protectorate administration and the language of statutes and offices. Setswana is the language in which a large part of the country names itself. The currency is called the pula. The word means rain in Setswana. The same word is the national salutation. In a dry country that is not decoration on the coin. It is the shortest political geography a state can have printed.

Diamonds are mined in the interior. They explain part of the public revenue, and they do not explain why the capital stands on the edge. The edge is the answer to Mafeking: close to water, the railway and the neighbour from which the country separated politically, without being able to detach itself from that neighbour geographically. Botswana is a wide, dry state with a young capital and a coin that says rain. The Kalahari remains the country. Gaborone remains the decision to govern that country from inside.

Botswana is easy to remember as the Kalahari and incomplete as long as the capital looks like an old matter of course. Gaborone is an intention. It stands inside the country because the state stopped letting itself be governed from a desk beyond the border.