Botswana's rapid transition between 1965 and 2016 from one of the poorest countries in the world to one rated as middle income has been extraordinary. Fifty years of change has seen the widespread disappearance of coal-fired locomotives and popularly used passenger trains, and ox drawn wagons. Blacksmiths, paraffin lamps, rondavels and thatched buildings, lime, women carrying buckets of water, metal water tanks have gone. The list goes on: the displacement of the round by the rectangular, migrant labour, hand cranked telephones and party lines, older men in army great coats, school children with bare feet, guttering and down pipes, granaries, the decoration of the lelapa, indigenous foodstuffs, the sub-language fanagalo, the crafts made for domestic needs. Yet more: changes in clothing, housing, property and vehicle ownership, means of entertainment, untarred main roads, do it yourself housing and in many places, general stores. The majority of the photos selected are of people. This is deliberate. It means that this book has no photographs that are routinely included in other books - the country's marvellous wilderness and wildlife, the Okavango and the Kgalagadi, the sand dunes and places of great natural beauty.

Botswana's rapid transition between 1965 and 2016 from one of the poorest countries in the world to one rated as middle income has been extraordinary. Fifty years of change has seen the widespread disappearance of coal-fired locomotives and popularly used passenger trains, and ox drawn wagons. Blacksmiths, paraffin lamps, rondavels and thatched buildings, lime, women carrying buckets of water, metal water tanks have gone. The list goes on: the displacement of the round by the rectangular, migrant labour, hand cranked telephones and party lines, older men in army great coats, school children with bare feet, guttering and down pipes, granaries, the decoration of the lelapa, indigenous foodstuffs, the sub-language fanagalo, the crafts made for domestic needs. Yet more: changes in clothing, housing, property and vehicle ownership, means of entertainment, untarred main roads, do it yourself housing and in many places, general stores. The majority of the photos selected are of people. This is deliberate. It means that this book has no photographs that are routinely included in other books - the country's marvellous wilderness and wildlife, the Okavango and the Kgalagadi, the sand dunes and places of great natural beauty.

Mochudi is in the Kgatleng District, where novelist and campaigner Naomi Mitchison was the adopted mother of Chief Linchwe II. Mochudi, the ninth biggest town in Botswana, is the home of the fictional Mma Ramotswe, of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. Mochudi is where Sandy Grant, escaping a desk job in a London publishing house, arrived in 1963, three years before independence, and before either Mitchison, from her journalism in the 1960s, or Mma Ramotswe, in the millennial years, raised the profile of this new country. In Mochudi he found a community in the midst of a famine, one whose life-style had changed little during the previous 20 or 30 years and where the ox-drawn sledge and wagon were commonly in use. He describes the beginnings of his forty-three years working understanding with the young Chief Linchwe and the oppressive weight of apartheid South Africa. When Independence came in a rush, the government of the new Botswana was technically bankrupt, and its very survival seemed in doubt. In its newly created capital, Gaborone, Sandy worked to provide relief and to foster local development initiatives and combat social injustice. As a long-standing newspaper columnist, he comments on the country as it emerged from poverty. His account describes elements of tribal life, rain hills and rain making, the initiation of young males and his conversion of an abandoned hilltop school into a multi-faceted museum. As a hands-on participant, he describes with a deft hand, his involvement with the democratic process, a range of intriguing personalities and events, amusing, personal, perplexing and disturbing.