Place to stay · Serowe
Serowe Hotel
Small 17-room hotel on Serowe's main road in Kgope Ward, with a restaurant, two bars and pools in the garden. A handy base for the Khama Rhino Sanctuary and the Khama III Memorial Museum.
Serowe Hotel is a 17-room hotel on the main road through Kgope Ward in Serowe, the Bamangwato capital in Central District. It sells itself as an overnight stop for people driving north towards the Okavango. The other reason to sleep here is the Khama Rhino Sanctuary, on the Orapa road north of town. The hotel’s own pages put it at 25 km on one and 30 km on another.
What to expect
The 17 rooms split into nine standard rooms, four suites and four chalets. All are en suite with air conditioning, DStv, Wi-Fi and tea and coffee. Standard rooms and suites have a mini-fridge. The suites add a sleeper couch, so they are the ones to ask for with children. The chalets are the smallest units but have a king bed.
You can eat here all day. The dining room does breakfast from 6.30am to 11am and the à la carte menu from 11am to 9.30pm. In the garden there is a pool bar next to the swimming pools that serves pizza and holds a braai every Friday night. Heidi’s Bar is the lounge bar.
Practical details
- No meals are included in the room rate, not even breakfast, so budget for them separately.
- Booking is online through the hotel’s own site, or by phone.
- There are two connecting conference rooms. The bigger one seats up to 75 at tables or 100 theatre style, and the hotel also hosts weddings and events. Ask what is on if you want a quiet night.
Good to know
The hotel will arrange cultural tours on request. In town it points guests to the kgotla (the tribal court) and the Khama III Memorial Museum. Serowe is where Seretse Khama, Botswana’s first president, was born, and Khama III founded the town in 1902, so the museum is worth an hour before you drive on.
Last updated 12 October 2026. Sources: Serowe Hotel, home page, Serowe Hotel, accommodation, Serowe Hotel, facilities and activities, Serowe Hotel, conferencing and events, Serowe Hotel, contact, Wikipedia, Serowe.
An owl, a donkey and a seventieth birthday cake
Margie Orford, the South African writer who later turned to crime novels, came to Serowe in 2005 looking for Bessie Head, and her first impression was of traffic, roadworks and dust. Then she woke in the small hours in her room at the Serowe Hotel and could not work out what had woken her. Nothing had. She lay there and counted one donkey bellowing and an owl calling twice, and wrote afterwards in the Sunday Times that the quiet changed how she saw the whole village.
That is one writer’s night, more than twenty years ago. It is still the best thing anyone has printed about sleeping here, and it is what the hotel is reaching for when it calls itself a country inn.
A cake for Mma-Head
Bessie Head was born on 6 July 1937, so in 2007 Serowe threw her a seventieth birthday party, 21 years after her death. Over the President’s Day weekend that July more than twenty visitors from abroad joined the village for three days of readings, plays and tree planting, with a convoy out to her grave on the hill behind Botalaote ward. On the Sunday, the 15th, extracts from her letters were read aloud in the hall at the Khama III Memorial Museum. Then came the cake, a tall layered one made by the Serowe Hotel. Unity Dow, a High Court judge then and already a novelist, was handed a very large knife and the job of making it go round. The organisers’ own report says it did, with enough left over for people to sneak slices later.
I like that better than anything on the hotel’s website. When the village needed a birthday cake for its most famous writer, this is where it came from.
Oxtail, bream and a chair in the garden
The hotel’s guest book is short and undated, and most of the names in it are Setswana ones, which suggests the dining room feeds Serowe as much as people passing through. Two of the five entries pick out the oxtail stew. One adds the grilled bream, another the steak and the sport on the television, and a third is simply about sitting in the garden with a drink.
I have not found a date for when the place first opened. An older, undated directory entry counts 15 rooms and one executive suite, one fewer than the hotel lists now.
The garden bulldozed for a filling station
Orford’s guide to the village was Scobie Lekhutile, then curator of the museum, and he laughed when she asked to see Bessie Head’s Serowe. All of it was, he said. “She wrote it.”
The one place he was slow to show her was Boiteko, the self-help project where Head taught the gardening group in 1970 and which fed her novels. The vegetable plots and the weaving workshops had been flattened the week before to make room for a filling station and a row of shops. Earth-moving machines were still at work and uprooted trees lay along the edge.
Serowe today has a shopping centre called Boiteko Junction, with a Spar and a fuel station. Nothing I have read says outright that it stands on the garden’s ground, but the name is hard to miss.