Colours
Read from the flag itself, down to the exact shade.
- #6da9d2
- #000000
- #ffffff
Other flags with white, blue or black or all of white, blue and black at once.
How it is put together
Measured off the picture, the same way the colours were, not from anybody's description of it.
- 5 horizontal bands
The fly edge changes colour going down, the foot does not, and every change is a straight line right across.
What we know about it
George Winstanley, a British colonial administrator, ran a design competition, called all the entries hopeless and drew the flag himself; it was first hoisted at midnight on 30 September 1966, replacing the Union Jack. The blue stands for water and rainfall in an arid country, and the black stripe bordered by white for racial harmony, an adoption read as a rejection of apartheid.
Drafted from Flag of Botswana on Wikipedia, as it read on 2026-08-26, and checked back against it: every date, name and number above appears in the sentences it was written from. Nobody here wrote it by hand.
Its day
The almanac keeps a page per day of the year that something is dated to. This flag is on one of them, with the sentence that says so.
Nearest in the world
Every flag is compared with every other one, off the pictures themselves. Two copies of one picture score 0; these are the closest to this one. How that is measured.
Quiz yourself
Ten questions, played on the page, no sign-up and nothing kept. Botswana is one of the flags in each of these.
The picture
- Licence
- Public domain
- Drawn at
- 1200 × 800
Credit SKopp, Gabbe, Madden
From Flag of Botswana.svg on Wikimedia Commons.
Take the picture, as a drawing or as an image, with the licence and the credit above attached to it.
