Prologue: Serowe at the dawn of the Swaneng era

The birds woke up long before the sun and proclaimed the day, a warm and lazy February 11,1963. A few hours later a group of 28 excited school students filed into a single room on the eastern edge of Serowe. They had in part constructed that classroom themselves. Many were already adults. Against the odds, they were about to start Form 1.

There was no ceremony to mark the launch of the new institution. The rough classroom stood on a dusty hillside, gripped by all the drought, poverty, and political uncertainty of the waning Bechuanaland Protectorate. But the hopeful students and the school’s founders knew that they had launched a brave project with big ideas: Swaneng Hill School.