The white ants

Let us now turn our attention to “white ants”, that is Europeans or white settlers, who the slain Bakwena kgosi predicted would follow in the wake of the earlier invaders.

Before the 1885 imposition of colonial rule, three broad types of Europeans had already had a major impact on communities throughout modern Botswana: Boers, traders and missionaries. Not all the Europeans who arrived, though, fell into just one of these three groupings. A lot of missionaries and Boers engaged in trade. There were also a few Boer missionaries.