As climate conferences come and go, as pledges are made and forgotten, there is conversation – earnest, bewildered searching – in the alleys of drowning coastal cities, around failed wells in the interior, midst the ruins of storm-flattened villages, and in the camps of the misbegotten who have fled terror spawned by clamor for thinning […]
Botswana
Posthumous Story: Passion for Peace, Restless Pang for Justice
Posthumous Story: Passion for Peace, Restless Pang for Justice
In the bad old days of apartheid, before the gates of Pollsmoor Prison swung open releasing Nelson Mandela into the sunny streets of Cape Town, South Africa in February, 1990, hope for change was as scant as water in the Kalahari. Across the face of central and southern Africa scattered resistance groups held out against […]
A Poacher’s Tears and Gratitude
A Poacher’s Tears and Gratitude
Alarming scenes are coming in from game-rich northern Botswana this week, where the carcasses of hundreds of elephants are strewn across the lush plains having perished from some mysterious cause. This is not the work of poachers – the tusks are all still intact – and there is ample water and foliage available. Early speculation […]
Contagion: Resilience of the Backcountry Elders
Contagion: Resilience of the Backcountry Elders
A saintly friend who ‘squandered’ much of her life caring for the disabled in the Kalahari once described to me what the HIV/AIDS pandemic had done to her settlement. ‘We are punch-drunk with sorrow and loss,’ she said, ‘as though pummeled by a heavy-weight fighter round after punishing round.’ This nun had no interest in […]
Traipser Rule of Thumb: One Soul Salutes Another
Traipser Rule of Thumb: One Soul Salutes Another
You cannot embark on any daily traipse for more than a few steps before engaging in a universal social ritual: the act of greeting. Customary though it be, this practice, full of possibility, possesses enormous significance whether in encounter with neighbor, stranger or even stray dog. Echoing the Hippocratic oath, the rule of thumb for […]
Desert Tales: When Hunter Becomes Prey*
Desert Tales: When Hunter Becomes Prey*
In the 1950s sub-Sahara Africa, still in colonial thrall, was a kind of wild west while the rest of the world restored what had been shattered by world war. The grasslands of Africa, thronged with wild life, remained in many places open range. In what was then a sleepy Chobe River village called Kasane (see […]
Desert Tales: Of Rustlers and Saving Refreshment
Desert Tales: Of Rustlers and Saving Refreshment
A close friend of mine once served as a policeman in Kalahari ranching country. As happens where cattle roam arid grazing land, rustlers find opportunity to lead away valuable critters on the hoof when no one is watching. My friend was assigned to investigate just such a case. With a contingent of fellow officers he […]
Going Deep and Wild: Ramble With a Kalahari San Traveler
Going Deep and Wild: Ramble With a Kalahari San Traveler
I stood hitchhiking across from the Kalahari Arms Hotel at a crossroads in Botswana’s ranching country. Hang around the Arms long enough and old timers will tell with glee about the goat known to wander in at drowsy midday hours to devour the bar kitty leaving only coins as a tip. Kalahari survival has its […]
Fireside Vision at the Back-of-Beyond
Fireside Vision at the Back-of-Beyond
The Trans-Kalahari highway leads west northwest out of Lobatse one of Botswana’s earliest western-style towns. (It contained at independence in 1966 the only stretch of tarred road in a country larger than France.) Once past Kanye, the land lies wide and open toward the ‘big dry’, the Kalahari, deepest overlay of sand on the planet. […]
Makgadikgadi: Soul Depths On A Salt Flat
Makgadikgadi: Soul Depths On A Salt Flat
If the Okavango Delta resembles a primordial Eden, then the neighboring Makgadikgadi Pans may be a picture of a climate-changed future, at least for the drought-prone swatches of the earth. Larger than the entire state of Connecticut, a baked crust of white clay stretches virtually without a single landmark, one of the largest salt flats […]
Safari To Dislocation – And Time Immemorial
Safari To Dislocation – And Time Immemorial
Safari (meaning ‘visit’ or ‘trip’ in Ki-swahili) has been a staple of Western travelers since Victorian times when outsiders with prodigious ‘kit’ came on tour to the bush country of Africa’s wild interior. Teddy Roosevelt figures high on the list of notables who tried their luck on the savannah. The tally of trophies taken in […]
Manhandled By Africa’s Beauty: The Smoke That Thunders*
Manhandled By Africa’s Beauty: The Smoke That Thunders*
Beauty in these wild places of Africa comes in two guises. There’s the filigree of a camelthorn tree against the dawn. Or in the rainforest the old-growth trees holding up in reverence a canopy that suffuses the underlay in green light. The only sounds: the rapping of rain from a shower striking the giant leaves […]
Royalty of the Thirstland: Is It End Game For The Baobabs?
Royalty of the Thirstland: Is It End Game For The Baobabs?
It’s the baobabs that will follow you home. Mysterious, massive, silent, on gnarled pillars they dominate the Kalahari thorn scrub, and the imagination. Ancient beyond telling, they are the grand elders of Africa’s arid hinterland, sentinels of the passing millennia. Now they’re dying. And no one knows why. news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/06/oldest-tress-africa-baobabs-dead-climate-science/ The San say that the creator […]
Sundown on the Chobe
Sundown on the Chobe
Few scenes in southern Africa are as life-brimming as Botswana’s Chobe river. To leave the sere thorn scrub of the Kalahari and stumble upon such a plain – an alpine-like pasture with a sheet of water slipping eastward toward the sea – that is rare refreshment in a thirstland. Life of every form, from the […]