Historically, the Okavango Delta has never been a place of high population density. The presence of malaria and sleeping sickness, erratic rainfall and poor soils, together with aggressive neighbouring kingdoms, meant that the delta was a place to where people have tended to flee.

The Banoka, a Khoisan people, have lived in the delta since the Late Stone Age. Hunter-gatherers, they were joined some 300 years ago by the Bayei, a Bantu tribe fleeing from conflict to the north. The two tribes coexisted peacefully and shared technology and hunting techniques. The Bayei became skilled fishermen and hippo hunters and the Banoka, or river Bushmen, were adept at trapping.

The striking Herero people of the southern delta are descended from those who escaped German retribution during a colonial uprising in Nambia. The pockets of San Bushmen to the west were pushed there by the expanding Batswana clan.

Another tribe, the Hambukushu, were Bantu farmers who settled in the northern delta and specialised in hunting elephants. The Hambukushu are also famous for their beautiful hand-woven baskets.

The 19th century European colonisers used the delta as a hunting area, rather than a place to settle and it has only been in the last 50 years that the delta has experienced substantial development and population growth, spurred by tourism, commercial hunting and support services.

A British colonial history has led to the adoption of English as Botswana's official language, with Setswana as the national language. Individual tribes maintain their mother tongues, whether Bantu or Khoisan.

The Okavango Delta has been under the political control of the Batawana (a Tswana sub-tribe) since the late 1700s. Most Batawana, however, have traditionally lived on the edges of the Delta. Small numbers of people from other ethnic groups such as Ovaherero and Ovambanderu now live in parts of the Okavango Delta, but since the majority of the members of those groups live elsewhere and the habitation is recent they are not considered as part of the Okavango Delta peoples.

There are also several Bushmen groups represented by a handful of people. These groups were decimated by diseases of contact in the middle part of the 20th century, and most of the remaining members have intermarried with the ||anikwhe.