I tell here a story of the multiple arenas in which a marginalized frontier community
creatively shaped its pre-colonial pastoralist ethnic identity to adapt to change across
colonial and post-colonial times. This dissertation is a socio-environmental history of the
Babirwa of eastern Botswana who transitioned from sheep and goat herders into cattle
herders from the second half of the nineteenth century to the present. Broadly, the
dissertation examines the Babirwa’s multiple engagements with social and environmental
change in Botswana to shape their ethnic identity amid colonial and post-colonial states’
modernist beef production policies. By ignoring the socio-cultural aspects of the
Babirwa’s pastoralist ethnicity, these modernist policies became part of a broader
political ideology that circumscribed ethnic difference and promoted a homogenized
citizenship based on Tswana national identity. To contest this Tswana-centric national
project, the Babirwa re-appropriated cattle raising to give social meaning to their ethnic
identity as the Bakgomong or “people of the cow.” As a result, the evidentiary basis of
this dissertation consists of their lived and learned experiences of fluctuations in cattle
populations since pre-colonial times. Personal testimonies, rumor, vernacular expressions
and folkloric texts are central to this story of change and continuity as the Babirwa
creatively engaged with transformative and co-constitutive social and environmental
landscapes and contested an elitist beef industry that threatened to dispossess them of
their cattle herds across colonial and post-colonial temporal spaces. Written here is
therefore an academically neglected history that explores the struggles of one of
Botswana’s obscure border communities over the control of cattle in a country where
climate variability is high, droughts are recurrent, crop production is fragile and
epidemics of cattle diseases are frequent.