Botswana

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]