This monograph is about the ecology and population dymanics of a group of cattle and goat herders in the northern Kalahari Desert of the Ngamiland district of Botswana. Although the Herero arrived in the region less than a century ago as destitute refugees, these staunchly traditional Bantu speakers have established themselves as a prominent and prosperous tribe in a pocket of the Kalahari previously occupied almost exclusively by !Kung-speaking foragers. Their rise to economic prominence in Botswana has been accompanied by dramatic decreases in mortality and increases in fertility, and a resurgence of tribal ethnicity. The demographic data were collected through intense ethnographic interviews of over 700 Herero living in North-Western Botswana. Studies such as this one illustrate the trade-offs between large-scale censuses that traditional demographers are comfortable with and small qualitative studies familiar to anthropologists and sociologists. Statistics from large national or regional studies that blur distinctions among genetically, historically and economically different groups may not reveal much about the processes that generated them because differences within groups ar