Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

Travel Talk

Botswana - an eclectic mix of indigenous people

From its origin in the highlands of Angola the Okavango River flows south for 1,430 km into Botswana. It is southern Africa's third longest river and yet it never reaches the sea.

Botswana, a flat, landlocked country about the size of France, is more than 500 km from the nearest coast. Three quarters of its area is covered by the Kalahari Desert and the Okavango is the only river that flows into the country. Where the river and desert meet the water fans out across the sand to form the Okavango Delta, a 16,000 sq km maze of lagoons, channels and islands. Ninety-five per cent of the water that spreads onto the delta is lost to evaporation in the dry desert air, most of the rest, all that remains of the mighty Okavango River, disappears into the sands of the Kalahari.

We began our trip to the Delta in Namibia, just north of the Botswana border, where the Okavango River cascades over Popa Falls. More a rapids than a falls, the river drops a few metres over a rocky fault scarp beyond which it begins to spread onto the wetlands of the Okavango Panhandle. Bounded by faults that confine the meandering river to a strip about 15 km wide, the Panhandle extends about 100 km south from the Namibian border before the water fans out onto the main delta.

The B8 highway through Namibia's Caprivi Strip crosses the Okavango just upstream from Popa Falls. We left the highway there and followed the river south on a gravel road to the Botswana border and beyond through a series of small settlements called Etsha. There are 13 Etchas in all, a nomenclature that harks back to the late 1960s when thousands of Mbukushu people fled south to escape the civil war in Angola. They were granted refugee status in Botswana and settled along the Panhandle of the Okavango Delta. Over time they organized themselves into 13 groups based on clan and social status and the numbers assigned to their refugee camps became a permanent part of the urban geography.

At Etcha 6 Odie, our South African guide, parked the Toyota and we transferred to the open back of a huge 4x4 truck with special tires for our trip across the desert to the river. The drive took more than an hour as the big vehicle repeatedly ground to a halt in the bottomless sand and had to claw its way out in bull low. As we approached the river the flat expanse of sand became a maze of dry watercourses winding through open forest, and at the river's edge the desert is transformed into a jungle of trees shrubs and reeds.

As we were crossing the sand I noticed small pits and rock circles in the desert and was curious about their origin. "During the wet season," the native driver told me, "most of the route we took across the sand is under water. The pits are for catching fish."

The panhandle is home to an eclectic mix of indigenous people. They live in local villages and their livelihood is tuned to the rhythm of the delta. During the summer rainy season (December to March) they fish in the flooded shallows and grow crops in the rich alluvial soil of small islands. In the dry season they graze cattle, harvest wild fruits and cut reeds for thatch. But unlike the surrounding desert and savannah, where the dry season can last for nine months, the delta is nourished each winter (May to Oct) by a second bounty of life-giving water. The surge of summer floodwater on the upper Okavango in Angola takes three months to reach the delta. It arrives during the driest time of year when the seasonal floodplains are baked and thirsty. Bringing with it a flush of new life and rejoicing among the people, the flood-wave takes another four months to wind its way through the sluggish channels of the outer delta. By October the floodwaters have vanished and life on the delta again marks time, awaiting the arrival of summer rain.

During our visit in early October the seasonal floodplain was already dry but water was still flowing through the deeper channels of the panhandle. The big 4x4 truck delivered us to the river and a pair of aluminum skiffs took us, and our gear, through a maze of channels to Makwena Camp, a cluster of open-sided thatch structures on an island near the southern end of the panhandle. A gallery of monkeys, ready to steal anything edible, watched intently as we set up our camp. It was already dusk by the time we finished one of Odie's sumptuous braai (BBQ) dinners and I lay in my tent listening to the sounds of the delta. A chorus of frogs, some bass some treble, joined the clicking, rasping and buzzing of courting insects, and the bellicose grunting of hippos was a reminder that larger creatures were also prowling the night.

In the morning we set out to explore the delta. Ray, a tall, handsome black man who knew every twist and turn of the delta's myriad waterways, was our skipper.

"Keep your heads down and your hands in," he warned as he raced his blunt-ended outboard skiff through papyrus-lined openings barely wider than the boat.

We burst out of the narrow tunnel of reeds into a grassy lagoon where hundreds of startled openbilled storks took to the air. Across the lagoon Ray plunged into another narrow channel then cut the motor and cautioned us to be quiet. At first I thought the rough brown lump on the bank was an outcropping of rock.

"A Nile crocodile," said Ray, "a big one." It was longer than our boat, probably at least five metres, and it lay motionless, mouth open, on the bank only a swipe of its giant tail from our skiff. We didn't need a reminder to stay quiet.

Our high-speed boat ride ended on the shore of a remote, palm-draped island on the inner delta where a group of polers were waiting for us with their mokoros. The island is one of many that support a small community of farmers and fisherman who increasingly augment their livelihood by catering to tourists.

For generations the dugout canoe or mokoro, propelled by a long pole, has provided reliable transportation between islands and across the shallow marshes of the delta. Giant trees from which the original mokoros were carved are now scarce but the traditional design has been faithfully reproduced in fiberglass and these rugged little craft are still the transportation workhorses of the inner delta.

"Each mokoro," Ray told us, "can carry two passengers and a poler. Most of the polers speak some English," he added.

Betty and I introduced ourselves to Left, squeezed into his boat and set out into the shallow marshes. Standing in the back of his craft like a Venetian gondolier, Left was not only an expert poler he also spoke perfect English and had a great sense of humor. He had left home, he told us, to attend school in Rundu before returning to the delta to work as a poler.

With each thrust of Left's pole the mokoro slid silently through beds of reeds and sedge, past grassy marshes dotted with hundreds of long-legged storks, and across shallow ponds covered with water lilies. Left paused and scooped up one of the delicate pink blooms. With dexterous fingers he snapped out segments of its long stem, transforming it into a necklace of tubular beads, and placed it around Betty's neck. "That's how we propose here on the Delta," he said with a laugh.

Back at Makwena Camp we watched the setting sun slide past a cluster of distant palm trees. It had been a long day, but there was more to come. Elton – camp manager, ecologist, and instigator of bizarre events – dropped past our campfire. "You guys want to go for a night cruise?" he asked.

We piled into the skiff, Ray at the motor and Elton up front holding a powerful searchlight. The beam cut through the darkness and scanned a wall of tall reeds against the shore. We had no idea what they were looking for until Elton handed the light to Odie and jumped, fully clothed, off the front of the boat. There was an audible gasp as he reappeared grasping a writhing metre-long Nile crocodile.

"You have to grab them here, between the front legs and the head," he explained.

The frightened animal flailed its tail and made squeaking noises which Elton interpreted – "He's saying ‘mama where are you?’"

I thought of the monster we had seen earlier in the day and wondered about Elton's sanity. He made two more catches that night and returned each one gently to the lagoon.

"Does he do this for all the visitors?" I asked Odie later.

"No, he just felt like it tonight," she said, "I think he gets bored sometimes."

Catching crocs with your bare hands in the dead of night struck me as a bit extreme, but maybe that's what living on the Delta does to otherwise sane people.