A bone-dry land the size of France, with a population of no more than 600,000: that is Botswana -land locked in southern Africa, newly independent, beginning the painful early steps toward modern nationhood. Much of Botswana. is the Kalahari Desert, where David Livingstone once established a mission station and brought the first western schools to an isolated and bucolic people. Today Botswana’s new leaders look to their vast mineral resources from which to fashion a key to the industrial future its people want.