In the 1960s and 1970s, the world was loud with change. Rockets reached for the Moon. Streets filled with marches for rights. New flags rose as empires faded. It was a time of thunder in the wider world.
Yet in Botswana, on the fringe of the unforgiving Kalahari and the vast Makgadikgadi salt pans, change arrived with a quieter sound: the rasp of a drill string, the first clatter of ore on steel, and then the hum of a town taking shape where there had been only scrub and sky.
The Makgadikgadi is the bed of a vanished inland sea that once sprawled across tens of thousands of square kilometres, and some research has even proposed that wetlands in this basin might mark an early homeland in the human story, a few others say is part of a broader, continent-wide picture. It is a magical setting for a beginning.
Botswana entered independence in 1966 with a brave idea and very modest means. For most of the colonial period the territory was run from Mafikeng in South Africa, and little was spent on development inside the Protectorate.
At the handover, the country had almost no infrastructure and very few productive assets. Scholars put per-capita income at about $80, with over ninety percent of people living from subsistence agriculture, only twenty- two university graduates in the whole country, and about eight kilometres of tarred road end to end.
The treasury leaned on British grants, not only for projects but even for day-to-day spending. Many households survived by sending men to work in South African mines and farms, a pattern entrenched since the 1930s. It is no surprise that outsiders wrote Botswana off as a labour reserve for South Africa, with the country’s economic prospects deemed none existential. In those years the regional climate was hostile too, with South Africa at one point showing intention to annex Botswana. A harsh mid-1960s drought only deepened the struggle and pushed the young state to create relief systems almost from scratch.
Then the ground spoke. In 1967 De Beers exploration team discovered diamondiferous pipes in Orapa on the fringe of the Makgadikgadi. The orebody was big enough to change the map. In 1969, the state and De Beers formed what is now Debswana, and through staged renegotiations the Government took its 50 percent stake while leaving day-to- day management with industry professionals. That mix of public ownership of the resource, shared equity, private operational know-how forms a big part of why Orapa did not stay a dream on paper. By July 1971, Orapa was in production and a new national chapter began.
HOW A MINE OPENS IN THE DESERT
The discovery of the kimberlite pipe might be credited to luck but what followed next belonged to hands and hours that built a mine where silence had lived. The pipe was enormous, and the location remote. De Beers and the Government backed the build with infrastructure first.
They put real money into roads and telephone lines from Francistown, installed a diesel power station, and sank boreholes for a temporary water supply. Engineers then designed a permanent scheme to draw water toward Mopipi via the Okavango and Boteti, and pump it roughly 64 kilometres to Orapa. All this so a mine could start in the middle of the bush and a town could rise around it.
At the same time, Botswana made rules that unlocked investment and kept it orderly. The Mines and Minerals Act (August 1967) vested mineral rights in the state, clearing a messy colonial legacy and creating a framework to negotiate with strength and predictability.
The early payoff was immediate and visible. In 1971, Orapa produced 821,914 carats; plans for 1972 called for 2.3 million tonnes of production yielding an estimated 2.4 million carats. That year diamond exports were expected to overtake cattle for the first time, with around R8 million flowing to government in royalties, tax and dividends, which was nearly double what the Southern Africa Customs Union (SACU) had provided the year before. The orebody’s sheer size kept mining costs competitive because open- pit methods could move huge volumes efficiently.
As of August 2025, Orapa mine is the only site that is in operation while Letlhakane and Damtshaa are on care and maintenance.
THE MINE BY THE PANS, AND THE TOWN IT MADE
Orapa is widely described as the world’s largest diamond mine by surface area, an open pit cut into two kimberlite pipes that converge near the surface. It is also the oldest of Debswana’s four mines.
Scale on a map is one thing. Scale in a life is another. Orapa did not become a fly-in, fly-out camp. It created Orapa Town, a neat, well-kept settlement known for its order, its parks and schools, its Adrian Gale Museum, and a game park founded in 1985 that now stretches across about 9,000 hectares.
Alongside the museum and the game park, the Orapa Training Centre has given the town a skills backbone, and a planned business park is meant to seed enterprise so the local economy can stand tall beyond mining. In the Boteti, that kind of place becomes a centre of gravity.
A town stays neat and well-kept when the mine beneath it keeps its rhythm. Streetlights and school bells depend on the hum of the plant. After the mine was secured, the work turned from starting up to staying power.
At the turn of the millennium Debswana delivered Orapa 2000, building the No. 2 Process Plant and a suite of upgrades that lifted capacity to about twelve million carats a year, a programme commissioned in May 2000. As the operation matured, stewardship mattered more than spectacle. Plant 1, in service since 1971, was retired at end of life, and Plant 2 took the load so the mine could run safer and cleaner.
Running deep into mid-century also means dealing wisely with what a mine leaves behind. Orapa, Letlhakane & Damtshaa mines (OLDM) is building a six-cell fines residual disposal facility , an investment in order and longevity rather than headlines.
And the next chapter is already drawn. Cut 3 will widen and deepen the existing pit, with preparations for commissioning in 2027 and first sales around 2034, extending Orapa’s life into the middle of the 2050s if markets and geology keep their word.
Through Orapa Today and Boteti Tomorrow, plans are unfolding to link the pans, tourism, and enterprise so the district can thrive long after the last truck rolls.
WHAT THE PARTNERSHIP DID FOR THE COUNTRY
What began at the pans did not stop at the edges. It moved across the map, into budgets and out again as tar and pipe, as clinic roofs and classroom light, as a civil service learning its craft.
Because the republic held the mineral rights and half of Debswana, every truckload could be counted as public income. From that steady stream came roads and water schemes, schools and hospitals, and the quiet machinery of a state that works. The choice was simple and held to with care to keep the resource in public hands, share the enterprise, let miners run the mine, and keep the books clean.
In that plain sequence Orapa became more than earth removed but rather the spark that set the country’s larger promise in motion.
Jwaneng will always command headlines for the value of its stones. Its Cut 9 programme keeps the open pit producing to about 2035, with an underground era to follow. But it was Orapa that laid the road and made the case that diamonds could power a modern state. And, if Cut 3 proceeds as planned, Orapa will still be working as the country crosses the 2050 line, with the pioneer humming on while others turn the page.
In this lifetime, when possible, everyone must visit Orapa mine and the town. Stand on the haul-road shoulder at dusk. The pans lie out there like a dry sea. Behind you the pit steps down to a darker blue. A loader moves. A light blinks on the headframe. This is where Botswana’s modern story began in earnest and where it keeps finding its balance, with a mine that opened in a place many had written off, tended by a partnership that learned to turn stones into public purpose, and kept alive by project after project that made sure the trucks kept rolling.
Orapa started the spell in 1967 and 1971. It carried Botswana through its first big test. It built a town that still feels intentional and clean, a place that belongs to the desert rather than standing against it. It does not always ask for attention. It does not need to. The work is there in the roadbed, the water line, the plant room, the long ledger of carats and pula, and the quiet belief that a good mine, managed well, can change a country.
