Francistown

Sister cities

• Genk

History

Although evidence of habitation by humans goes back around 10,000 years, written evidence is more recent. Historical evidence shows that Francistown started off as one of the villages of the BaKalanga people. Nyangabgwe was the nearest village to Francistown to have been visited by Europeans, when it was visited by the missionary, Robert Moffat. Moffat was followed in 1867 by a gold prospector, Karl Mauch who found the Bakalanga mining gold along the Tati River, and publicised the Tati Goldfields starting the first Southern Africa goldrush. The present town was founded in 1897 as a settlement near the Monarch mine and named after Daniel Francis, an English prospector from Liverpool who acquired prospecting licences in the region in 1869. Francis was a director of the Tati Concessions Land (Tati Concessions Company), which acquired the land from King Lobengula. The centre of the new town was formed when the company sold off 300 lots in August of that year. The Monarch mine was not the only mine in operation at that time, and it was widely believed that Francistown would grow rapidly. In the beginning, the town comprised one street east of, and parallel to the railway line. This street featured several companies, including two hotels (the Grand and the Tati), retail and wholesale shops, and three banks. Prior to independence Francistown was Botswana's largest commercial centre. In 1897, the company sold part of the land for residential and commercial purposes. The city started as a gold mining town, and gold sustained the area's economy from the late 1800s until the 1930s. When gold was discovered nearby in 1869 it sparked the first gold rush in Africa fifteen years before the gold boom at Witwatersrand in South Africa. The industry was hard hit by the global recession…

Most-observed species

• Laughing Dove

  Spilopelia senegalensis (Linnaeus, 1766) · Aves
  211
• Common Bulbul

  Pycnonotus barbatus (Desfontaines, 1789) · Aves
  189
• Gray Go-away-bird

  Corythaixoides concolor (A.Smith, 1833) · Aves
  187
• Fork-tailed Drongo

  Dicrurus adsimilis (Bechstein, 1794) · Aves
  167
• Speckled Pigeon

  Columba guinea Linnaeus, 1758 · Aves
  166
• Southern Cordonbleu

  Uraeginthus angolensis (Linnaeus, 1758) · Aves
  157
• Red-eyed Dove

  Streptopelia semitorquata (Rüppell, 1837) · Aves
  151
• Ring-necked Dove

  Streptopelia capicola (Sundevall, 1857) · Aves
  135