Botswana Emoji

🇧🇼 the Botswana flag emoji shows a light blue field crossed by a black horizontal band edged in white. The Botswana flag emoji is encoded as two regional indicator symbols, 🇧 and 🇼, for the country code BW, which phones and Macs draw as the flag. Windows has no flag pictures in its emoji font and shows the letters BW instead, but whoever opens your message on a phone still sees the flag.

The flag was raised at independence on 30 September 1966, when the Bechuanaland Protectorate became the Republic of Botswana. The light blue stands for water, above all rain, the most precious thing in a dry country; the black band with its white edges stands for black and white people living together, and it also echoes the stripes of the zebra. Where flags don't show, the flag colours can be shown with hearts: 🩵🤍🖤🤍🩵.

The zebra 🦓 is Botswana's national animal. Two zebras hold up the shield of the coat of arms, one with an elephant tusk and one with a stalk of sorghum 🌾. On the shield are three cogwheels ⚙️ for industry, three wavy lines 🌊 for water and a bull's head 🐂 for the cattle that have long been the measure of wealth here. The national football team is called the Zebras, so 🦓⚽ needs no explanation on a match day.

Under the shield runs the national motto, one word: Pula, "rain". It is the blessing that ends speeches and toasts, shouted back by the crowd, and it is also the name of the currency. 🌧️, ☔ and 💧 are the emoji for it, and 🌧️🙏 after a long dry spell is about the happiest message a farmer can send.

Botswana currency symbol: the pula, P and thebe

The Botswana pula (ISO code BWP) replaced the South African rand in 1976 and is divided into 100 thebe, a Setswana word for shield. There is no special Unicode sign for it: Batswana write a capital P in front of the amount, as in P50 or P 1,000, and banks write BWP 50. So the "pula symbol" you can copy is simply the letter P; in chats people add 🪙, 💵 or 💰.

Diamond exports helped build Botswana's foreign-exchange reserves; those reserves help limit disruptive exchange-rate swings. They were found at Orapa in 1967, a year after independence, and Debswana, owned half by the government and half by De Beers, runs the mines at Orapa and Jwaneng, often called the richest diamond mine in the world by value. Beef 🐄🥩 is the other old export, and cattle posts out in the bush are still part of many families' lives.

Setswana letters: ê, ô and how to type them

English is Botswana's official language and Setswana its national one; by CLDR estimates about 2 million people in Botswana use English and about 1.5 million speak Setswana, out of a population of around 2.5 million. Setswana is written with the plain Latin alphabet plus two letters with a circumflex, ê and ô, which mark the open e (as in "bed") and the open o (as in "law"). Dictionaries and school books use them to tell words apart; in everyday writing, signs and texts most people just write e and o.

The harder parts of Setswana spelling are the letter groups, not accents: kg is a rasping sound from the back of the throat, as in kgosi (chief) and kgotla, the village meeting place; tlh, tsh, ng and ny are single sounds too, and the g at the start of Gaborone is breathed, close to an h. The prefixes tell you who is who: Botswana is the country, a Motswana one person, Batswana the people, Setswana the language.

To type ê on Windows hold Alt and type 0234 (0202 for Ê); for ô type 0244 (0212 for Ô). On a Mac press Option+I, then the letter. On a phone, long-press e or o and pick the circumflex. In HTML they are ê and ô. For the whole alphabet see the Tswana collection; English and Afrikaans, which also uses ê and ô, have their own pages too.

Botswana food emoji: seswaa, pap, morogo and phane

Seswaa, the national dish, is beef boiled for hours with salt in a three-legged iron pot and then pounded until it falls into shreds; it is the meat at weddings, funerals and Botswana Day. In emoji it is 🍖🍲🔥, served with 🌽 for pap, the stiff maize porridge, or 🥣 for bogobe, porridge made from sorghum. 🥬 stands for morogo, wild spinach and other cooked greens.

🐛 is not a joke here: phane, the mopane worm, is a fat caterpillar picked from mopane trees, dried, and fried or stewed, and many Batswana love it. 🫘 is dikgobe, beans cooked with samp or sorghum, and 🥜 ditloo, the Bambara groundnut. 🍉 stands in for lerotse, a Kalahari melon cooked into porridge, 🍩 is the nearest emoji to magwinya, the fat cakes sold at every bus stop in the morning, 🥛 is madila, soured milk, and 🍺 is a cold St Louis, the local lager.

Okavango, Chobe and the Kalahari: wildlife and places in emoji

Botswana has more elephants than any other country, about 130,000 by most counts, and the Chobe riverfront is a famous place to see them, so 🐘 is a natural emoji to post with 🇧🇼. Add 🦁 🐆 🦒 🐃 🦛 🐊 for a full game drive in the 🚙, and 🦏 for the rhinos brought back to the Khama Rhino Sanctuary and the Okavango.

The Okavango River never reaches the sea: it fans out across the Kalahari to form an inland delta of swamps, channels and palm islands 🌴, whose waters drain into the desert sands. The way to travel it is the mokoro 🛶, a dugout canoe pushed along with a long pole by a poler standing at the back. In 2014 the Delta became the 1,000th site on UNESCO's World Heritage list. To the south lies the Kalahari 🏜️, with sunsets 🌇 and night skies 🌌 people fly a long way for, and the Makgadikgadi salt pans, where flamingos 🦩 gather after good rains. In the far northwest the Tsodilo Hills 🪨🎨 hold thousands of rock paintings, sacred to the San and Hambukushu people who live around them.

Off safari, 🛖 is the round, thatched house of a traditional village, 🌳 the tree under which the kgotla meets, 🧺 the woven baskets of Ngamiland, and 🤝 the handshake that goes with Dumela, often with the left hand touching the right forearm as a sign of respect.

Music, sport and Botswana Day: emoji people send

Choirs 🎤🎶 are everywhere in Botswana, at church ⛪, at school and at weddings, and traditional dance troupes 💃🕺 perform to drums 🪘🥁 and whistles at every national celebration. Less expected is Botswana's heavy metal scene: its fans dress in black leather, studs and cowboy hats, so 🤘🎸🤠 is a fair portrait of a metal festival in Gaborone.

In athletics 🏃 Botswana punches far above its size. Nijel Amos won the country's first Olympic medal, silver 🥈 in the 800 m in London in 2012, and Letsile Tebogo won its first gold 🥇 in the 200 m in Paris in 2024. Football ⚽ fans follow the Zebras, who reached their first Africa Cup of Nations in 2012.

Botswana Day, 30 September, marks independence and comes with a second holiday on 1 October; the emoji are 🇧🇼🎉🎆 with Happy Independence Day or Pula!. Sir Seretse Khama Day on 1 July remembers the first president, and Christmas 🎄 is another public holiday for gathering with family. And for readers abroad Botswana is often first met in books 📖: Alexander McCall Smith's The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency 🕵️‍♀️ follows Mma Ramotswe, Gaborone's first lady detective, and her cups of red bush tea 🍵.