Matsieng's Footprints: The Tswana Creation
According to Tswana tradition, Matsieng, a powerful one-legged giant considered the first ancestor of the Batswana people, emerged from a waterhole in southeastern Botswana. As he climbed out, he was followed by his people, domestic animals, and wildlife, all sinking their feet into the soft, unformed early earth. Their footprints hardened into stone over millennia, preserved as a sacred site now known as the Matsieng Footprints. The site contains over 170 carvings of human and animal footprints, which archaeologists date to the early second millennium and attribute to Khoe herders. To this da