Song of Tsodilo

SONG OF TSODILO

            This is the third and final discourse on our July vacation trips. After we finished our four-day stay in the game reserve at Mashatu, we traveled for two days overland from the easternmost point of Botswana to the northernmost tip. There, just west of the Okavango River and on the edge of the Kalahari Desert, we visited Tsodilo Hills, a collection of rocky outcrops that house a vast number of ancient San rock paintings.

            A bit of history is in order. The original inhabitants of southern Africa are the San people, commonly known as the Bushmen. You may recognize them by their languages, which include many varieties of distinctive clicks. Their culture has been featured in National Geographic television specials and in the 1980 film The Gods Must be Crazy. The San represent one of the oldest branches of the human species. Traditionally they are hunter/gatherers. They could once find enough game and wild plants to feed themselves, even in harsh desert conditions. They were indigenous to Botswana, South Africa, Namibia, Angola, Mozambique and Zimbabwe.

            Today, the San number fewer than 100,000 people, mostly centered in the Kalahari Desert of Botswana, Namibia and South Africa. They have been pushed to marginal habitats, as have other hunter/gatherer groups around the world, like the Aborigines of Australia and the Native Americans of North America. The difference here is that the farming peoples who displaced the San are fellow Africans, along with some Europeans. Today, various Bantu ethnic communities (such as the Tswana, Shona and Zulu) as well as Afrikaaners (Dutch) inhabit much of the former San territories.

            Attempts to “settle” the San into fixed communities in Botswana have met with mixed success. Peace Corps volunteers who work in villages in the Kalahari report many challenges in the well-meaning governmental efforts to give San children a Western education, and to provide their families with modern housing and health care. There is extensive litigation in the Botswana courts over the resettlement of many San out of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, which comprises the entire middle section of the country.

            With that backdrop, let’s move on to the travelogue. We arrived at Tsodilo early in the morning. We hired a member of the local San community as our tour guide. We hiked up one of the hills, scrambling over boulders all the way. On the nearby rock cliff faces, our guide pointed out line paintings - in red – of various animals in profile, including giraffe, rhinoceros, lion and antelope species. There is even a penguin represented, which shows that the San’s territory once extended south all the way to the cold shores of the Cape of Good Hope. Some of the images are more than 20,000 years old. They resemble somewhat the cave paintings of animals found in Lascaux, France. Remarkably, the Tsodilo paintings have survived for centuries in the harsh sunlight, a tribute to the mixture of substances used by the artists.

Giraffes and many more animals painted at Tsodilo

Penguin and fish, from 20,000 years ago and 1000 miles away.

Two living fossils spotted at Tsodilo

            Tsodilo is very remote, and so it receives few visitors. On the day of our hike, we shared the park with two other Peace Corps volunteers, a German volunteer and her family on holiday, and two busloads of well-behaved local school children on an overnight camping excursion. From the barren summit of the hill, we were very much alone, and yet so close to the earliest expressions of human creativity. Looking out, we could see flat expanses all around us, stretching to the horizon. To the east extended the lush green Okavango delta and to the west the dry expanse of the Kalahari. The early San surely must have stopped to admire this view as they prepared to record for posterity the animals they had seen, and maybe hunted, in their travels around southern Africa.

            After our hike, we talked to another guide at Tsodilo. His father and grandfather spent much of their lives at a hut in a col near the summit of one of the hills. He told us that there used to be an abundance of wild game for the San community to hunt in the area. But with the arrival more than 150 years ago of the ethnic Batswana farmers, and their many cattle and goats, the wild animals had largely disappeared. The guide spoke English and Setswana pretty well, so at least he can make his living as a tour guide. I am not so sure about his kin.

            

On the Beach in Mozambique

ON THE BEACH IN MOZAMBIQUE

            Okay, serving in the Peace Corps is not all about deprivation and doing good deeds day in and day out. We also get to take really cool vacations. Living here close to the Kalahari Desert, we have been missing the ocean – a lot. So with our schools on holiday, we grabbed at the chance to travel to the beach. Since it is winter here, we decided to visit Mozambique on the Indian Ocean, a warmer choice than the colder Atlantic beaches near Cape Town, South Africa or those in Namibia.

            We consulted the inveterate travelers among our fellow Peace Corps volunteers to find just the right place to visit. Along with three other volunteers, we decided to rent a villa (Casa Algodoal) at Tofo Beach, an emerging resort village about one-third of the way up the Mozambique coast. Unlike our younger compatriots who can better tolerate up to 24 hours sitting in a crowded country bus, we decided to fly on comfortable turboprops straight to an airport near Tofo.

            We were not disappointed. Tofo is perched on a bay framed by sandy beaches and dunes studded with cocoanut palm trees. Although it is winter, the temperature rose up to the high 70’s each day, with blessed humidity. Back in very dry Goodhope, there is little moisture to lubricate the sinuses or to soften the cool winter winds. Our villa stood on a hillside overlooking the beach. The roof and walls were made from palm fronds and straw. It featured a fully equipped kitchen and bathroom inside, with a shower and braai stand (the Afrikaaner word for barbecue) outside.

            We ate about half our meals in and the other half out at local restaurants. Our lunches and dinners featured all varieties of seafood: prawns (shrimp), langusta (spiny lobster), crabs, mussels, lemon fish, tuna, barracuda etc. We used the braai to grill lemon fish. Stephanie brought along Indian spices and fixed a meal featuring shrimp curry. We must have embarrassed ourselves in restaurants by first ordering, and then devouring, huge plates of mixed seafood.

            We all took long walks along the beach, and I took the opportunity to run on the sand most mornings. Tofo is known for harboring a large population of harmless whale sharks. There are several snorkeling operations that ferry tourists out to a reef to swim with the sharks. We passed up this chance, in part because there had been no shark sightings that week. While we dipped our feet in the surf, we opted not to swim in the ocean, in part because the water was a bit cooler than our now thinned-out blood could take.

            One day, some of us took an excursion to nearby Flamingo Bay, a vast tidal estuary that seemed like a tropical version of Scarborough Marsh. We boarded a dhow, a flat-bottomed boat with a lateen sail (think of a sunfish boat) used by fishermen along the east coast of Africa, as well as along the coasts of Arabia and India. The boat crew pushed long poles into the mud, gondolier style, to augment the action of the wind currents. We collected a number of shells along the many sand bars in the bay at low tide. The crew then sailed us to Ilha dos Porcos, an island in the middle of the bay. We disembarked and explored. The island’s 800 inhabitants survive very well from fishing and from growing sweet potatoes and papaya. Cocoanuts fall from the palm trees that shade the sandy soil of the island. We ate a seafood lunch served by the island’s chief at his makeshift outdoor restaurant.

Here we are walking on the sand, just like in Botswana. Hey, wait a minute,  there's water over there, and plenty of it.

Fishermen in Flamingo Bay hauling in a net onto their dhow.

Our villa, Casa Algodoal, fully equipped with every amenity.

         

            Back in Tofo village, we spent time exploring the wares offered by the vendors in the mercado, or marketplace. Unlike the Batswana, the Mozambicans like to negotiate the price of just about everything, from vegetables to handbags to t-shirts. There were plenty of souvenirs available. As for stocking up our kitchen for meals at home, the mercado proved to be a bit of a challenge in terms of selling staples.

            A bit about Mozambique: it was a former Portuguese colony (along with Angola, Cape Verde, etc.). Unlike the British, the Portuguese did not invest much in their African territories. Mozambique obtained its independence only in 1974, and then suffered close to twenty years of civil war. It has for the most part enjoyed democratic and economic growth since 1992. Still, Mozambique’s flag design reflects its violent past: its banner includes the image of an AK-47 rifle. From what we could tell, in the years since Apartheid ended, South Africans have taken the opportunity to invest heavily in Mozambique tourist havens. Perhaps half of the visitors and homeowners that we saw in Tofo Beach came from South Africa. There are also Peace Corps volunteers serving in Mozambique, but we did not run across any.

            On our trip back to Botswana, someone called out my name while I was standing in a long passport control line for transit passengers at the Johannesburg airport. It was a friend from New Hampshire, on his way back to the US from a charitable trip to Malawi. Apart from the serendipity of that meeting, it was good to have our first tangible contact with home after almost 11 months in Africa.