Portrait of a local girl in a village near the camp Khwai River Lodge by Orient Express in Botswana , within the Moremi Game Reserve Wild . Botswana. Botswana 's geography is marked by its two major myths : Kalahari Desert and the Okavango Delta . After a long way from Angola, the Okavango River to the northwest of the country comes to pour their waters , not the ocean as usual, but to the arid lands of the Kalahari , where a sea of ??sand arise 15,000 square kilometers of canals, islands , unimaginable flora and fauna . Neither the legendary desert wilderness is the place you'd imagine, but semiarid savanna rich covering 85 % of the total land area , where vast plains of grass and mopane forests alternate with fine red sand , gray and white , headlands rocky dunes and finally we all hope to find . Its borders are : to the north and west by Namibia, Zimbabwe to the east , and south by South Africa. In the southeast of the country is the most fertile and the most densely populated. The 80 % of the population lives in rural areas . No wonder that the Bushmen people of Botswana for over 30,000 years , have been cornered in the most remote regions of the Kalahari. His spirituality has allowed peaceful coexistence with the ethnic groups who have settled in their territory throughout the centuries . Any dispute was resolved with friendly fragmentation of tribal groups under which the losers were established elsewhere. This civilized practice was possible until the early nineteenth century , when all pastures bordering the Kalahari were already distributed and expansion into South Africa was impossible. Knowing how vulnerable that made them the fragmentation in these circumstances , able to regroup on a highly structured society ruled by hereditary monarchies . The recent history of Botswana , like most African countries , has been marked by the interests of the colonial powers. In this respect, the question : What interest would manage 50 million acres of sand ? The answer is easy : its strategic value. For Britain represented the possibility of connecting the valuable lands north of the port of Cape Town. Portugal sought a passage between Angola and Mozambique. For the Germans it was just a way to not fall behind in the race for the division of the continent.