Botswana is full of beautiful wilderness
areas and places of historical and cultural interest. It’s the wildlife areas of Chobe, Moremi, and
Savuti and the incomparable Okavango Delta which draw the tourists, but there’s
an incredible diversity of interesting places.
The Kalahari sprawls across most of the country coating it in deep, pink
sand. If deserts appeal to you – as they do to me –
you will find many beautiful stark scenes in the Central Kalahari Game
Reserve. There are also cultural sites
as interesting as any in the world. We
have written before about the treasure trove of Bushman (San) art at the
Tsodilo Hills. Believed by the Bushmen to be the birthplace
of mankind, human habitation there goes back tens of thousands of years.
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| Michael, Mompati and Sheldon |
I’ve just returned from a trip to Botswana
and this time I was lucky enough to have a friend with me who is a serious
photographer. The trip had two main
focuses: a launch of DEADLY HARVEST at Exclusive Books in Gaborone, and a visit
to Shoshong, a village of great historical interest going back to David
Livingstone’s era. This was our first
proper launch of a Detective Kubu novel in Botswana, so I was really looking
forward to it. I persuaded Professor Sheldon
Weeks - book reviewer for the weekly Botswana national paper Mmegi - to lead the discussion of our
books. It wasn’t a big crowd, but it was
an enthusiastic one and a good time was had by all thanks to the store’s
manager, Mompati Seditse, and our South African publisher, Jonathan Ball.
The next day we set off along the old road
north. This was an important trade route
in the nineteenth century and only lost prominence when Cecil Rhodes built his
“Cape to Cairo” railroad much further to the east. From the old road, one comes into Shoshong
from the west side and on the way you pass a sign announcing: Pitsane Hill
2Km. Here was a place I’d never
visited. So we pulled onto a donkey cart track and muddled our way till we found a cow path heading into the hills. There we stopped and walked up Pitsane Hill.
The hills forms a saddle and you can walk
through it down to a river – dry, of course – which we realized was the same
one that was once responsible for Shoshong’s prominence. In this area of the hill, there was an iron
age settlement over 1000 years ago. The
Botswana National Museum tells us that these people worked metal for
tools, kept cattle, and grew crops in the area.
The relics are at the museum and not much remains to be seen of
the Pitsane Hill settlements today, but the walk is wonderful. You climb the hills – sharing the route only with
cows, who seem to know where they're going although there is really nowhere to
go. There are wonderful views of the
surrounding plains. You descend through
a gorge into the riverbed, surrounded by the fascinating Dolerite boulders and
screes of the hills that protected Shoshong from hostile tribes to the
north. But the most fascinating part is
to be surrounded by the amazing Paperbark Corkwood trees (Commiphora
Marlothii). Our timing was perfect. The trees were developing new green spring
bark, sloughing off the old in rice-paper like fragments. As you walked, the wind made them whisper and
rustle like animate things.
The launch was great, but it’s the walk in
the hills of Pitsane that I’ll never forget.
Oh.
I was supposed to tell you about Shoshong. Well, another time.
Michael – Thursday.
Photographs by Jonathan Everitt.
