Thamaga is a large village located in the Kweneng District of

Botswana Botswana, officially the Republic of Botswana, is a landlocked country in Southern Africa. Botswana is topographically flat, with approximately 70 percent of its territory part of the Kalahari Desert. It is bordered by South Africa to the sou ...

and about 40 km west of the capital city

Gaborone Gaborone ( , , ) is the Capital city, capital and List of cities in Botswana, largest city of Botswana, with a population of 246,325 based on the 2022 census, about 10% of the total population of Botswana. Its metropolitan area is home to 534, ...

. It is home to 19,547 inhabitants at the 2011 census. It is becoming year by year like a suburb part of the Gaborone agglomeration. The village is dominated by large rock formations, the largest being Thamaga Hill. Thamaga is third in the district to Molepolole and Mogoditshane in both size and population. The majority of the residents are from the Bakgatla-ba-ga-Mmanaana Tribe, and their totem is the

vervet monkey The vervet monkey (''Chlorocebus pygerythrus''), or simply vervet, is an Old World monkey of the family Cercopithecidae native to Africa. The term "vervet" is also used to refer to all the members of the genus '' Chlorocebus''. The five distin ...

(kgabo). The name Mmanaana come from the tan/white cow (Mmanaana coloring). A significant amount of archaeological research has taken place in the surrounding area over the last ~20 years, and current research is being conducted by a team from the

University of California-Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after the Anglo-Irish philosopher George Berkeley ...

and the

University of Botswana The University of Botswana (UB) was established in 1982, as the first institution of higher education in Botswana. The university currently has three campuses: one in the capital city Gaborone, one in Francistown, and another in Maun. The Unive ...

. The Bakgatla-ba-ga-Mmanaana settled there in the mid-1930s and they are a break-away group and the same people as Bakgatla-ba-ga-Mmanaana in Moshupa, just 17 km to the southwest. Most of the old village wards where the tribes men settled from Moshupa maintained the same names as the wards in Thamaga. People of any particular wards between the two villages are related and commonly use similar surnames. Even the chiefs of the two villages are of the same blood and use common names of Mosielele and Gobuamang. The area was formerly inhabited by various groups or "Bakgalagadi" (earlier arrivals of Bantu-speaking farmers and herders) and hunter-gatherers ancestral to \he people today called San,

Bushmen The San peoples (also Saan), or Bushmen, are the members of any of the indigenous hunter-gatherer cultures of southern Africa, and the Indigenous peoples of Africa, oldest surviving cultures of the region. They are thought to have diverged fro ...

, and Basarwa. The history of these peoples in the Thamaga area, based on

radiocarbon dating Radiocarbon dating (also referred to as carbon dating or carbon-14 dating) is a method for Chronological dating, determining the age of an object containing organic material by using the properties of carbon-14, radiocarbon, a radioactive Isotop ...

, has been traced back at least 5000 years. Government and Infrastructure * Service Centre- for provision of government services. * There are three government clinics and one primary hospital. Education There are seven government primary schools: * Gobuamang Memorial School * Monare Memorial School * Rungwana Primary School * Western Primary School * Magalatladi Primary School * Nkoane Primary School * Kontle Primary School Three junior secondary schools: * Thamaga Junior Secondary School * Letlole Mosielele Junior Secondary School * Sekgele Junior Secondary School There is one private primary school * Highridge, and one private secondary school * Highridge Secondary School. There are numerous private creches and day care centres.

Gallery

File:ThamagaRocks.jpg, Rock formations in Thamaga

References

{{Coord, 24, 43, S, 25, 32, E, region:BW_type:city, display=title Populated places in Botswana Kweneng District

Gallery

See also

References