- By : Mr. Naren Nautiyal
- Date: 15-04-2015
- Views : 23892
- [Lolua, Tuvalu]
Tswana people are Niger-Congo or Bantu-speaking people including all the Sotho-Tswana clans residing either in Botswana, Lesotho or South Africa, any member of the Sotho-Tswana clans that trace their origin from Kgosi Mokgatle, citizen of Botswana regardless of linguistic or ethnic origin, members of the eight major Sotho-Tswana clans as defined in the Chieftainship Act of Botswana and members of the Sotho-Tswana clans that reside in Botswana, South Africa that speak a standardized dialect of the Sotho-Tswana called Setswana sometimes also referred to as the Western Sotho.
The Sotho-Tswana group includes the Basotho of Lesotho and the Orange Free State, to whom the term 'Sotho' has come to be more specifically and almost exclusively applied. This group is sometimes referred to as the 'Southern Sotho'. A third group comprises the Northern Sotho who at times have been incorrectly referred to as the Bapedi. One of the chief characteristics of the Sotho-Tswana clans is the tendency to break up and hive off.
Currently there are over 16 million Tswanas living in Batswana, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The largest population of Tswanas live in South Africa. Botswana is a country of Be-Tswana people, one member of this country is Mo-Tswana and their language is Se-Tswana.
They speak Setswana Sechuana and Sesotho sa Lebowa. Setswana is sometimes referred to as Beetjuans, Chuana (hence Bechuanaland), Coana, Cuana, or Sechuana. It is spoken across South Africa and is one of the 11 official languages recognized by the South African Constitution, it is also the national and majority language of Botswana. In 2006 it was determined that over 3 million South Africans speak Setswana as a home language.Tswana was the one of the first written Sotho languages. The earliest example being Heinrich Lictenstein’s 1806 text called Upon the Language of the Beetjuana. Followed by John Cambell’s Bootchuana words (1815) and Burchell’s Botswana in 1824.
The languages of the Sotho-Tswana and other Bantu-speakers have a number of common features - they are agglutinative in construction, nearly all the words ending in vowels or with a nasal consonant, nouns do not indicate masculine or feminine gender, and these nouns are highly alliterative in character owing to an elaborate system of noun classes functioning in much the same way that gender does in European languages.
Origins of the Tswana
Migrations of ironworking and iron-using peoples into southern Africa probably occurred as early as the beginning of the Christian era. Among such communities were the ancestors of people later called the Tswana. These were small-scale migrations of families, clans and groups of clans migrating in a variety of directions. Some groups became the - for the emergence of larger states which we call kingdoms. Indications are that these large states developed during the second millenium of the Christian era and that the plethora of modern chiefdoms were due to fission caused as much by droughts, famine, pestilence search for better conditions as by dynastic ambitions and rivalries.
The Tswana chiefdoms form part of the larger group of Sotho peoples, while the Sotho group itself is one of the three great sub-divisions of the Bantu-speaking peoples situated north of the Nguni. In addition to the Batswana or 'Western Sotho', the Sotho group includes the Basotho of Lesotho and the Orange Free State, to whom the term 'Sotho' has come to be more specifically and almost exclusively applied. This group sometimes also is referred to as the 'Southern Sotho'. A third group comprises the Bapedi who have been generally referred to as the 'Northern Sotho,.
These different Sotho groups that together may be more conveniently described as 'Sotho-Tswana' at the very earliest stage of their history, shared a number of linguistic and cultural characteristics that distinguished them from other Bantu-speakers of southern Africa. These are features such as totemism, a pre-emptive right of men to marry their maternal cousins, and an architectural style characterised by a round hut with a conical thatch roof supported by wooden pillars on the outside. Other minor distinguishing features included their dress of skin cloaks or dikobo and breech-cloths, a variety of Buispoort-type pottery closely related to Schofields NC2 variety, and a predilection for dense and close settlements, as well as a tradition of large-scale building in stone.
