Sotho-Tswana interior

The interior plateau west and north of the Highveld, and the region whose political tradition ran opposite to the Zulu one. Sotho-Tswana societies built unusually large towns - Dithakong and Kaditshwene held tens of thousands of people in the early nineteenth century, larger than Cape Town at the time - organised around cattle, chieftaincy and the kgotla, a public assembly where a chief's decisions could be argued with in front of everyone. That institution is the reason the region's successor states have an unusual record with consultative government. The upheavals of the 1820s, the Difaqane, hit here hardest: Mzilikazi's Ndebele passed through and settled for a decade before moving north to found what became Matabeleland, and towns that had stood for generations were destroyed. Moshoeshoe rebuilt a nation out of the fragments in the mountains to the south. Boer settlement after the Great Trek took the best-watered land, and the diamond fields at Kimberley, discovered in 1867 on ground the Griqua and Tswana both claimed, were annexed by Britain on an arbitrated verdict that satisfied nobody. Kimberley then invented the closed compound system that the gold mines copied. Under apartheid the region was carved into Bophuthatswana and QwaQwa, homelands assembled from scattered fragments of land. Botswana and Lesotho, across the borders, are the parts of the same cultural world that escaped incorporation. Setswana and Sesotho remain the dominant languages of the South African interior. Mafikeng, once the capital of Bechuanaland, sits in this region. Bloemfontein is the judicial capital of South Africa. The Vredefort dome, the oldest and largest known impact crater on earth, lies on its eastern edge. Kimberley's Big Hole closed in 1914.

• Existed: 1000 CE – present
• Type: Entity