During the final quarter of the nineteenth century both the British and the Boers sought to control the land of the Tswana peoples between the highveld and the Kalahari desert, the Boers to secure and extend the western frontier of the South African Republic, the British to control the route from the Cape to the interior of the continent. The colonial geography of the region was shaped in the mid-1880s when British forces overthrew the short-lived republics of Stellaland and Goschen, and Britain annexed the Bechuanaland Protectorate and the Crown Colony of British Bechuanaland (later incorporated in the Cape in 1895). The strategic importance of the land occupied by the Tswana determined that Bechuanaland, unlike Basutoland or Swaziland, became a theatre of military operations during the South African War, and that the administrative capital of the Protectorate (situated immediately beyond its frontiers), Mafeking, should become the most celebrated town associated with the war. Situated adjacent to it was the Tshidi-Barolong settlement whose name, meaning ‘the place of stones’, had been corrupted in the naming of the white town, Mafikeng.

The significance of Tswana country in British military planning has only recently been fully revealed. In July 1899 Colonel R. S. S. Baden-Powell was despatched to southern Africa to raise a force of 1000 men to patrol the northwestern borders of the Transvaal.