Rapid urban growth in sub-Saharan Africa is generally caused by poverty and disaster. The resulting shantytowns, overcrowding, and lack of infrastructure have been widely recorded. But what happens if a remote rural village – largely untouched by colonialism – is abruptly subjected to the pressures of globalisation and prosperity? Letlhakane is the fastest growing town in Botswana, due to diamond mining. This paper focuses on Letlhakane, and aims to determine how rapid growth, material prosperity and the influx of strangers has been influencing the relationship between 1) settlement form, 2) culture and 3) the customary spatial patterns. The Tswana (the dominant indigenous population) have an uninterrupted history of settlement building in southern Africa, stretching back nearly 600 years, which produced agro-towns (reportedly as big as contemporaneous Cape Town) by the early 19th century. Letlhakane offers a rare opportunity to track the unfolding of an indigenous settlement model, from the Iron Age into the 21st century. Whereas Gaborone and Francistown, Botswana’s largest cities, were colonial creations, Letlhakane’s transformation is a postcolonial phenomenon. Letlhakane has retained an informal morphology up to now, instead of the barrack-style layout of Orapa (a company mining town only 20 kilometres away), albeit somewhat denser and less organic than a typical 19th century Tswana agricultural town, such as Shoshong. In fact, it seems as if Letlhakane is mutating from one state of informality, into another. In order to contextualise Letlhakane’s transformation, it is compared to nearby Orapa and Shoshong, by applying Kevin Lynch’s classic elements of paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks with a focus on geometry and land-use intensity.
