Africa's quiet diamond capital, gateway to the Okavango Delta
One of Africa's youngest and most stable capitals, built almost from scratch after independence in 1966 — Botswana's diamond wealth funded one of the continent's most consistent records of peaceful governance, and Gaborone today is the practical jumping-off point for the Okavango Delta and Kalahari beyond.
Gaborone was little more than a small village and colonial administrative outpost named after Chief Gaborone of the Batlokwa people until it was chosen as the newly independent Botswana's capital in 1966, largely because the previous colonial capital, Mafikeng, was inconveniently located inside South Africa. The city was essentially built from the ground up over the following decades, funded by the discovery of major diamond deposits soon after independence.