THE area now known as Botswana was used as a passage to areas outside of South Africa by the European settlers.
They called it Bechuanaland and it was bigger than present-day Botswana, encompassing some parts of South Africa.
The Botswana passage was pioneered by Robert Moffat who was a member of the London Missionary Society (LMS).
Moffat learnt Tswana and successfully converted many Tswana kings into followers of Western Christianity.
He sent reports of mineral wealth to the Cape which was under the British and more members of the LMS would visit Botswana after him.
King Khama III was successfully converted to Christianity by the Europeans.
He refused to be initiated customarily because of his newly acquired Western beliefs.
His cousin Khamane did the same and they were revered by the Europeans for doing so.
It is not surprising the current President of Botswana, who is a descendant of Khama III, had a white mother from Britain.
Through her, President Khama bears the title of ‘Sir’ in the British royal family and this was all the fruits of his ancestor Khama III’s abandoning of culture in favour of the whiteman’s religion.
For this reason, Botswana was, and continues to be, a passageway for white settlers into places like Zimbabwe.
Today Botswana hosts American intelligence and army bases that are used to monitor activities in countries like Zimbabwe which are in its vicinity.
Earlier this year, WikiLeaks exposed that South Africa had also been secretly used as a spy site for countries in southern Africa.
The infamous Cecil John Rhodes was one of the whites who used Botswana as a passageway to the interior of southern Africa.
He had left Britain at the age of 17 after suffering health problems and settled in Natal with his brother who ran sugar plantations.
He began mining diamonds in Kimberley and started a company with some friends called De Beers.
In 1888 he merged it with a Jewis diamond miner called Barney Barnato and it became known as De Beers consolidated.
De Beers Consolidated had control of all diamond mining in the region and Rhodes became excessively wealthy and ambitious.
He used his wealth to gain prestige in Britain and took it upon himself to extend Britain’s colonial territory.
Britain, however, showed no interest in the interior and remained functional only at the Cape and in Botswana’s LMS stations.
Rhodes, however, believed SA was just the tip of the land and the rest of the interior had more mineral resources to exploit.
He planned on helping Britain to colonise the region from South Africa’s Cape to Egypt’s Cairo and to link these colonies by rail.
His ambitions were strictly colonial.
Rhodes also used his wealth to become a Cape Parliamentarian.
South Africa, in this period, was divided between the Dutch Boers, the British and local blacks.
The Dutchmen who were called Afrikaners had claimed the Transvaal region and also Orange Free State, which were both republics independent of the British Cape colony.
Rhodes desired for a United South Africa under the authority of Britain and believed he could win Britain leverage by laying claim to the resources that were in SA and the interior i.e. Botswana and Zimbabwe.
The Dutch had been laying claims in Botswana since the time of the Great Trek and this hindered his clear passage because the Dutch were hostile to the British.
The Ndebele were also frequent raiders in Botswana since the time of King Mzilikazi.
The Ndebele were feared in Botswana because they killed humans for their possessions.
However, the Ndebele had fled from the whites in fear of guns in the days of King Mzilikazi and were known to avoid attacking places with whites.
When the Dutch figured this out, they began making the blacks pay for protection from the Ndebele and other rival groups by way of land and livestock.
Through this cunning, the Dutch established the Boer republics of Stella-land and Goshen in Botswana.
Rhodes then used his wealth and position in Parliament to encourage Britain to take more interest in Botswana and Zimbabwe, arguing they may fall into the hands of the Dutch or the Ndebele.
LMS member John Mackenzie was sent to Botswana to aid the British in the cause that Rhodes had put forward.
This was only after the British government had heard reports of British lives being taken during the territorial fights.
What accelerated the colonisation of our lands was competition and jealousy between European settler communities of different backgrounds.
They cared not about the indigenous population and thus the blacks would succumb to bribery, conversion, loyalty tax, tribute and other forms of cunning for whites to achieve their goals.
In 1884, Mackenzie was appointed deputy commissioner of the region encompassing Transvaal and the Cape.
Mackenzie was instructed that all the area would from thence be under British rule.
The Boers found this unfavourable and the blacks were not even aware of the agreements that were being made in distant Europe.
Mackenzie met so much resistance from the Boers that he was recalled after only three months and Rhodes successfully replaced him as deputy commissioner.
By that time, the Boers had completely lost it and went on raiding sprees, killing blacks in South Africa and Botswana and acquiring their land and cattle.
To white settlers, blacks were merely potential labour resources that were in the way of the farm lands and minerals that they wanted.
To acquire the land, whites simply tricked, chased or killed blacks.
In 1884, gold was discovered in the Transvaal area and also in Witwatersrand in 1886.
Rhodes was worried because these were Boer strongholds and would ruin his plan of making the British, as opposed to the Dutch, financially dominant in the United South Africa that was underway.
He increased pressure on Britain to claim Botswana and it did so beginning January of 1885.
By September of that year, Britain had claimed Botswana and the whole of the Kalahari.
As a result of this move by Britain, the Dutch Afrikaners moved further inland and a Boer called Grobler entered Zimbabwe.
He approached King Lobengula who was the ruler of the Ndebele and was stationed at Matopos.
By July 1887, he had managed to get King Lobengula to sign a treaty called the Grobler Treaty.
Rhodes was taken over by jealousy and told Britain the Afrikaners would certainly deny them access to the rich interior if the British did not hastily counter this treaty.
Britain sent LMS member Reverend J.S. Moffat, son of Robert Moffat, to King Lobengula.
The Moffat Treaty was signed and ensured King Lobengula would not sign treaties with other foreign powers without the consent of Britain.
Rhodes capitalised on this treaty by sending his agent Charles Rudd to get King Lobengula to sign the Rudd concession.
Zimbabwe had no central leader since the Changamire’s demise.
For 100 pounds a month, 1 000 rifles, 100 000 rounds of ammunition and a gun-boat on the Zambezi River, King Lobengula unknowingly sold off lands besides his own.
He could not read and thought the whites wanted to bring in a few men to prospect for minerals, but soon after he realised he had been fooled into signing the whole land of Zimbabwe away to Rhodes’ company.