Botswana Food Guide

The quick answer

The center of Botswana eating is seswaa with a starch. Seswaa is beef or goat simmered long and slow with little more than salt, then pounded until it falls into soft strands. It is the national dish, it appears at every wedding and funeral and kgotla gathering, and it is excellent.

Why the beef is this good

Cattle are not incidental in Botswana. They are wealth, status, kinship and history — the national currency is named for rain and the national herd is what rain is for. Cattle move through Setswana proverbs, bride-price and inheritance, and the country's beef industry has long been a serious export earner with tight veterinary controls behind it.

Practically, this means the beef on your plate is likely to be grass-fed, slowly grown and very flavorful — and it explains the disinfectant mats and veterinary checkpoints you will cross on the roads. Those fences are protecting an industry.

What to eat

• Seswaa — the pounded beef above, usually with pap or bogobe. If you eat one Botswana dish, eat this.
• Bogobe — porridge, most traditionally from sorghum, which suits this climate better than maize does. Bogobe jwa lerotse cooks it with melon into something between a side dish and a dessert.
• Pap or phaletshe — the stiff maize porridge familiar across the region, eaten with the hand.
• Dikgobe — samp and beans, sometimes with sorghum. Hearty, and the usual partner to seswaa at a gathering.
• Morogo — wild or leafy greens, cooked down, often with tomato and onion. The vegetable backbone of the everyday plate.
• Phane (mopane worms) — the caterpillar of the emperor moth, harvested off mopane trees, dried and then fried or stewed. Genuinely nutritious, genuinely traditional, and a staple rather than a stunt. Try it because it is food, not because it is a dare.
• Serobe — slow-cooked offal, a delicacy at celebrations.
• Magwinya — fried dough, sold everywhere, eaten warm.

Drinks

Chibuku, the commercially produced sorghum beer sold in cartons, is thick, sour and an acquired taste; traditional home-brewed bojalwa is its ancestor. Ginger beer — the homemade, spicy, non-alcoholic kind — is a common celebration drink and very good. Regional lagers are widely available, and Botswana has a serious craft-gin scene in Gaborone that surprises people.

Madila, cultured sour milk, is a traditional accompaniment worth trying with bogobe.

Eating on safari

Camp food is generally excellent and international, with Botswana dishes appearing at least once in most stays. Dietary requirements are straightforward with notice — camps buy in for the guests they are expecting, so tell your operator early rather than on arrival. Ask for seswaa; most kitchens will happily make it and are pleased to be asked.

Eating in town

Gaborone, Maun and Francistown have proper restaurant scenes, and the best value is usually a lunch buffet at a local place where seswaa, morogo and dikgobe are served together for very little. That is the meal to seek out.

Practical care

Tap water is treated and generally safe in towns, and camps provide filtered water. Take the usual care with raw salads and unpasteurized dairy outside established kitchens. See the CDC guidance below and our Botswana travel safety guide.

Eating with LABUSA Travel

We build in at least one proper Botswana meal rather than leaving you on lodge menus for a fortnight, and where a community kitchen is part of the experience, that is where we would rather take you.