Shashe River Shashe is a sand filled channel, with extensive alluvial aquifers in the river channel and below the alluvial plains. These supply water for a number of irrigation schemes including Sibasa and Shashi. More than two million years ago, the Upper Zambezi River used to flow south through what is now the Makgadikgadi Pan (presently a vast seasonal wetland) to the Shashe River and thence the Limpopo River. There is a road bridge and a rail bridge south of Francistown. The lower Shashe River forms the border between Botswana and Zimbabwe and is unbridged. However, at Tuli, both sides of the
Botswana–South Africa border the Limpopo River, and the border runs along the Limpopo to its confluence with the Shashe River, which is the tripoint with Zimbabwe. The western portion of the border from the Namibian tripoint to Ramatlabama was the border between British Bechuanaland to the south and the Bechuanaland Protectorate to the north. British Bechuanaland was constituted as a Crown Colony by proclamation in 1885, and incorporated the lands of the Tswana people situated to the south of the Molopo River, west of the South African Republic (the Transvaal) and not already part of the Cape Colony. The Tswana lands north of