Botswana

Tswana religion turned on Modimo, a high god approached not directly but through badimo, the ancestors, who guarded the moral order of household and chiefdom; rainmaking was a royal duty, initiation schools made adults of the young, and the diviner's bones read the causes of affliction. The London Missionary Society arrived early in the nineteenth century, Robert Moffat translating scripture at Kuruman on the road north and David Livingstone marrying his daughter and pushing beyond, and conversion soon became entangled with chiefship.

Rulers who accepted the mission, most famously Khama III of the Bangwato, banned rain rites and initiation in their territories, so that Christianity spread as much by royal law as by preaching. The protectorate years left Botswana with mission churches but no settler established religion, and after independence in 1966 the country's prosperity and peace gave its religious life an unusually calm cast.

The fastest growth since has been in Pentecostal congregations and in Zionist and Apostolic churches whose healing, uniforms and night vigils answer older spiritual needs, while the census records a steady minority who name no religion at all, among the region's highest. Badimo observance persists beneath denominational labels, in funerals, ancestor obligations and the quiet consultation of traditional doctors.

Khama III of the Bangwato, baptised in 1860 against his father Sekgoma's bitter opposition, became the most consequential Christian ruler in southern Africa. Once secure in the chiefship he legislated his faith: initiation ceremonies lapsed, rainmaking was set aside, bride wealth practices were reformed, and above all he prohibited European liquor from his territory, enforcing the ban against white traders as firmly as against his own people, which made him a hero to the British temperance movement.

In 1895, when Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Company sought to swallow the Bechuanaland Protectorate, Khama sailed to London with two fellow rulers, Bathoen and Sebele, and toured chapel Britain as the model Christian king. The three chiefs won their case; the Colonial Office kept their territories under direct protection, a decision without which modern Botswana would likely not exist.

Khama's Christianity was his own instrument as much as the mission's. He quarrelled with and dismissed missionaries who overreached, kept the church subordinate to the kgotla, and used the new faith to centralise a chiefship the old rites had dispersed among rainmakers and ritual specialists. He ruled until his death in 1923, and his grandson Seretse Khama became independent Botswana's first president, heir to a dynasty in which chiefship and Christianity had become one inheritance.