Botswana plugs

Life has been very busy!  Here is a short piece outlining just one of the interesting aspects of life in Botswana.

A consideration of some importance to life at home and work is the diversity and constraints involving power plugs.  Botswana uses three rectangular prong plugs.  South Africa uses plugs with three circular prongs. This is important because most of the appliances available here were manufactured in South Africa: something you may not think about before coming here.  Cell phone chargers have two thin round parallel prongs and then, of course, there are our western style plugs (some of which have 2 flat prongs and some of which have 3 prongs in which 2 are flat and one is semi-rounded).


Upon arrival, one must track down and purchase various adapters and power strips of all sorts and keep them around at all times and this involves plenty of seemingly universal problems. Some of the adapters are hard to obtain and others are everywhere, and the quality really varies so some of them seem to short out with black marks around the holes after just a few uses.   At work, technical gadgets will rarely have Botswana plugs and the adapter is always missing. So South Africa-to-Botswana adapters must be located in order to plug the appliance into the wall outlet.  At home, we just set up all the plugs with the appropriate adapters in power strips on multiple adapted extension cords (most rooms have very few outlets) so that just about anything can be plugged in somewhere.  Extension cords and power strips have Batswana, South African or US plugs and sockets -- take this into consideration!  I always carry around a few adapters so that the laptop can be plugged into either Batswana or South African sockets.

To make matters more interesting, the South African to Botswana adapters are very large and the wall outlets have little switches right beside the holes to turn them on or off. 

So one must gingerly balance the adapter in the holes so that the switch is not inadvertently pushed to off!  These adapters are very low quality (our few high quality ones we purchased before coming here only adapt US to South Africa) and so sparks will jump around as we adjust and prop and push the various plugs and adapters to try to get a functioning connection.  Some of the adapters have very floppy holes for the cell phone chargers which need to be propped and weighted somehow into place so charging will take place and continue.  We also brought a transformer with us that works very well converting 220 volts to 110 volts for the small appliances, but it is a big, heavy and hard to move around.

So…why does Botswana, a country of 2 million people with almost no industrial production, have its own plug design?  Hmmm…who can say?!  Just one tiny and fascinating aspect of life in Gaborone!