Namibia enters the account as a neighboring territory whose colonial status shaped British policy toward Bechuanaland and later formed part of the difficult regional setting faced by independent Botswana. It is not treated as a history of Namibia itself; its significance lies in the way European competition and surrounding white regimes constrained the choices available to the Tswana states and Botswana.

Colonial Setting

In 1885, Britain declared Bechuanaland a protectorate. The Tswana accepted the arrangement in the hope that it would shield them from further European incursions, especially those of the Boers. Britain had its own strategic purpose: it wanted to prevent additional Boer expansion and possible German expansion. Germany had annexed the area of southwest Africa corresponding to present-day Namibia, making that territory a concrete sign of the competing colonial power pressing toward the region.

The British government regarded Bechuanaland less as a prospective settlement than as a route inland and a buffer against rival powers. Its limited interest in administering or settling the protectorate helps explain the political environment in which Tswana leaders later had to defend their lands: British protection could be useful, but it was not an assurance of extensive British investment or self-government.

A Neighbor in the Struggle over Bechuanaland

By 1895, the threat to Bechuanaland came not only from the earlier contest among European powers but also from Cecil Rhodes’s expanding British South Africa Company. The company had moved north from South Africa, expropriating large areas that would become Northern and Southern Rhodesia, now Zambia and Zimbabwe, and Rhodes was looking toward Bechuanaland. The chiefs of the Ngwato, Ngwaketse, and Kwena judged that annexation by Rhodes would bring exploitation and disaster. Unable to defeat him militarily, they went to London to seek greater British control as the lesser danger.

Namibia’s place in this episode is different from Rhodes’s direct campaign: it figures as the territory Germany had annexed, and thus as part of the strategic context behind Britain’s protectorate policy. The surrounding map of colonial ambitions made the Tswana chiefs’ options stark. Their initiative helped prevent Rhodes’s takeover, while the wider European contest remained a pressure on the region rather than a guarantee that its inhabitants would determine its future.

Botswana’s Independence and Regional Constraints

When Bechuanaland became independent as Botswana in 1966, Namibia was one of the white-ruled regimes surrounding it, alongside South Africa and Rhodesia. The new country was exceptionally poor, with only twelve kilometers of paved roads, twenty-two university graduates, and one hundred people who had completed secondary school. Its nearly complete encirclement by regimes hostile to independent African countries governed by Black people made its prospects appear especially uncertain.

Botswana’s subsequent growth and institution-building stand in contrast to that constrained beginning. The book attributes its development to inclusive political and economic institutions, including regular competitive elections and policies that secured property rights and encouraged an inclusive market economy. Namibia’s significance in this account remains regional and comparative: it is named as part of the hostile white-governed environment against which Botswana’s political independence and later development took place.