The Herero of Western Botswana

by Frank Robert Vivelo

As an anthropologist, the author lived among the Herero, a tribe of pastoralists in the Kalahari Desert in Botswana, Africa. Since Herero society had changed drastically from descriptions of it in earlier literature, Vivelo’s challenge became to present and explain Herero social organization as it appeared to him in 1973—to describe what had changed, how it had changed, and, perhaps most interesting, why it had changed.