Gaborone – the modern city that is home to about 10% of the entire population of Botswana – has an interesting name that does not immediately sound like a word in any language you know, until it is explained in just one short phrase. However, we are going to use more than just one short phrase to get to the bottom of the etymology and meaning of Gaborone.

Botswana’s most important settlement by far is one of its youngest. Well, depending on how you look at it. What evolved into today’s buzzling metropolis was the site of a small settlement which had existed for 80 years, but as little more than a satellite of grazing lands to the nearby Batlokwa village of Moshaweng. In the early 1880s, Kgosi Gaborone and his Batlokwa relocated from the Gauteng area in South Africa and established the village that they then called Moshaweng, between the boundary of the Transvaal state and the Notwane River. This village would later become known as Tlokweng.

Not long after, Cecil John Rhodes, who had started his initiative of establishing a rail track “from Cape to Cairo”, laid his initial track from Mafikeng to Palapye, which ran some 15km west of the new Batlokwa capital. It made sense, therefore to establish a station in that location for easy access to the rail service for Tlokweng. In deference to the King of Batlokwa, the settlement that emerged from the construction of this station was named Gaberone’s Village, or in short, Gaberones. Note that the spelling had an E after the B (as a result of the British attempt at Setswana orthography). The name would later be changed to the correct Setswana spelling of the name Gaborone’s, and the possessive S was removed, so it became Gaborone – the same name as that of the person it was named for.

But because of the evolved pronunciation of the last O in the word, it does become immediately clear to even a native Setswana speaker what the word means. Like many Setswana names, the word is actually a contraction of the phrase “ga bo rone”, which literally translates to something like “it is not unsuitable”. Simply put: it is suitable/becoming. Legend has it that this refers to the chieftaincy – to allay doubts of anyone questioned the legitimacy of the ruler/heir.

Back to the issue of Gaborone’s age: At about 140 years, it is in fact, one of the older towns in modern Botswana, as most of the current Tswana settlements in Botswana were established within the past 200 years by peoples who initially lived in what is called South Africa today. Not to say the lands were not inhabited, as the initial residents were mainly nomadic Khoisan people who were easily displaced by the Tswana with their superior military prowess and more complex societal and political cultures in the central and southern parts of Botswana. The northern parts of the country have a longer history of Bantu peoples of the likes of Kalanga, Subiya, Yei, and Mbukushu, who too had military prowess and complex political societies.

This notwithstanding, the history of Gaborone is often only traced back to the mid-1960s, when a deliberate effort was made to establish the capital of newly independent Botswana. Prior to independence, the Bechuanaland Protectorate was administered from Mafikeng in neighbouring British Bechuanaland, which had since been assimilated into the Cape Colony, which later became a part of the South African republic. So yes, the capital of Botswana was once in South Africa.

Many argue that this was the actual starting point of Gaborone’s life, as prior to that, it had been little more than a small settlement that served primarily as an access point for the people of Tlokweng to the railroad. Despite being named for the Batlokwa leader, the settlement of Gaborone was also seen as not being affiliated to any of the tribes here, and was therefore deemed sufficiently neutral to become the national capital.
A future article will discuss the establishment and building of the town of Gaborone.