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.