Drifting Through God's Country
Travelling by Dugout Canoe with Botswana's River Bushmen
Toronto Star, May 8th, 2008
NEAR SERONGA, BOTSWANA — Starlings pour like smoke from distant acacia trees. They stream overhead in shaggy columns as we glide towards Xumazi, one of the hundreds of islets that populate the vast Okavango Delta. Twenty metres off a hippopotamus breaches, yawns, smites its jaws. A languid warning.
"Let me show you something," Gripper, my guide, says. He kneels at the prow of our mokoro, or dugout canoe, resting his pole across the width of it. The papyruses on either side of us bend until their feathered tips kiss the water, then whip upright. Reed frogs, milk-coloured moths, and tiny spiders flood the boat. Gripper plucks a lily from the water, using the mokoro's diminishing momentum to tear it off just above the root. He runs his hands along the stem, measuring out thumblengths and folding the thing until it snaps, again and again.
"This is how you make a Xanekwe wedding necklace," he explains. He arranges the lily in slithery coils around his neck and knots the flower beneath his chin. "Very pretty," he says, a little wistfully, "on a pretty woman." Gripper is a romantic: In between lessons on tracking warthogs and vouchsafing the contents of one's tent from baboons, he has talked sweetly and unselfconsciously about his two wives (childhood and midlife sweethearts) and his girlfriend. I can't help but feel a little guilty for keeping him away from home, even if it's only for a couple more days.
Fanning out across the northern Kalahari sands, the Okavango Delta is Africa's largest and most biodiverse wetland, a big-ticket attraction where tourists and big game congregate, sunscreened cheek by bloodied jowl. For wildlife enthusiasts, now, the beginning of the dry season, is as good a time as any to visit. Buffalo, impala, zebras, wildebeest, elephants and kudu have migrated deep inside the delta, predators in tow.
The Okavango is also intensely multicultural. A mix of indigenous peoples farm its arid soil and fish its champagne-coloured waters. Some, such as the Xanekwe, or River Bushmen — Gripper's tribe — moonlight as guides to people like me, travellers hoping for a glimpse of Botswana's delta cultures. Their work is part cultural entrepreneurship and part survival strategy.
I've sought out the Okavango Polers Trust, a mokoro collective headquartered in the sleepy riverbank town of Seronga on the delta's northwestern extremity. The panhandle region, as it's called, receives few of the thousands of tourists who visit the delta every year, drawn by Botswana's reputation as a luxury safari destination.
The 75 members of the Polers Trust, mostly Xanekwe and Wayeyi fishermen, hire themselves out part-time as trackers, guides, and cultural interpreters. For about $60 a day — a fraction of what the safari companies charge — they'll take you camping in the bush. You have to bring any food you don't plan on catching yourself, and they won't promise a leopard sighting or an elephant encounter. What they will do is help you see the delta through their eyes.
As we approach Xumazi, Gripper steers our mokoro into reeds so thick they've become an extension of the island. Once the boat is safely wedged into a sandbank, we pad through marsh grass into the bush. Today's excursion is to be a lesson in Xanekwe medicine. The whole island, I learn, is an apothecary. There are cures for rheumatism and colic, headaches and infertility. Gripper shows me 'lucky beans,' a remedy for cramps. Rattling the crimson seeds in his fist, he rolls them like dice into the grass.
The morning's biggest discovery, though, is the fruit of the improbably named sausage tree, with its aphrodisiac properties. By incorporating the fruit into rites too elaborate to explain here, the Xanekwe ancestors believed any man could enhance his physique to suit his ambitions as a lover. With a ripe piece of fruit and the right combination of words, instant, thumping virility could be his.
"They say if you get the words mixed up you have a big problem," Gripper deadpans.
We wander the island for several hours. My guide explains how to extract honey from a hive foaming with bees, and shows me a special flowering weed used as stuffing for pillows. At the foot of a half-shredded amarula tree he spots patties of still-warm dung. We've just missed an elephant — a cow or a young bull, he guesses.
"They like to eat the amarula fruit when it is very ripe," he explains, "and they are knocking over trees to get it." He tracks the animal for a few hundred metres, losing the trail near the water. I stifle my disappointment as we drag the 12-foot fibreglass mokoro into the shallows and push off.
Mekoro are traditionally carved from the trunks of jackalberry and other old-growth, hardwood trees, but the conservation-minded government has set restrictions on the amount of timber that can be harvested for boat-making. It's a point of contention among the delta tribes, which comprise only a small portion of Botswana's 1.6 million people.
One fisherman I spoke to, a graceful, silver-haired Wayeyi man I met on the water taxi into the delta, insisted he'd never use a boat he hadn't carved himself. To some Okavangans, the fibreglass mekoro that are slowly replacing traditional wooden boats symbolize their culture's egress. As young people leave the delta to pursue jobs in the cities, many of the older generation worry that their languages and traditions will yield to the those of the Tswana people, who dominate the country's political and cultural life.
"This place," the old man told me, as we sped through a labyrinth of reedy channels, "is god's special place. And we are god's special people. I feel it. We must protect our culture."
My guide is more optimistic. "The government, they want to preserve the delta. That is good," Gripper says. "Sometimes they forget that we are living here for hundreds of years. We are doing this already."
Recent events, such as a 2001 high court ruling that enshrined minority rights in the constitution, have given Okavangans reason for hope. The government has begun to underwrite community-based initiatives like the Polers Trust, partly as compensation for the quotas, which also restrict hunting and fishing.
"The way things are now, it is a good balance. I am a fisherman. Sometimes, like today, I am a guide. It is good to share our way of life with people like you, and I can earn extra money for my family."
But what if tourism were to replace fishing as his livelihood?
"Who are we if we are not fishermen and hunters? If we all become guides, then what is left of our culture? No, I think the situation today is better."
Back at camp — a clearing on a neighbouring island where we've built a fire — Gripper cooks a lunch of barberfish and night lilies. We eat the fragrant stew with sadza, or maize meal, a staple of southern African diets, and warm lager from the dry goods store back in Seronga. For dessert there's watermelon. It's abundant everywhere in the delta right now.
"The baboons and elephants, they love watermelon as much as we do," Gripper says, lopping the end off the glossy fruit with his machete. "Right now, the farmers are worry-worry." He digs out the flesh with his hands. I follow suit, slopping juice and seeds all over myself.
Drought may be the biggest threat to the Okavangans' way of life. No deeper than a few metres at any point, the delta can fluctuate between five and 15,000 square kilometres in a single year, depending on the rains. Ancient channels crisscross the sandbed, evidence that the seasonal ebb and flow happens within more extreme, epochal cycles of flood and drought.
In the 1980's, a seven-year drought turned much of the region to dust and boiling mud. Conservationists questioned whether the Okavango ecosystem would recover. But recover it did, and for now the delta is a land of plenty. Given this endless caprice, it's no wonder locals hold fast to their nature-worshipping religions or that the few who have converted to Christianity are drawn to fire-and-brimstone Pentecostalism.
We set off again in the late afternoon. Out on the water, the delta is a confined immensity. There are no markers of extent: no definitive shoreline, no telltale current, no silhouettes of distant hills. Just water and reeds and lilies and the sky, a fathomless blue, crossed slowly by the sun. It's like a soundstage, with painted backdrops for scenery. I feel like I'll spot the seams if I look closely enough.
The pleasures of the day are lazy pleasures, intense in their way: of listening to Gripper's stories of courtship and foolishness. Of seeing more birds than I can begin to name — plovers, hammerkops, a fish eagle. . . Of trailing a hand through water so placid each finger leaves its own wake. Of learning a few words of the Xanekwe's beautiful, impossible language, with its clicks and pops.
And then a herd of fifteen or twenty elephants emerges from the trees. They ease themselves into the lagoon, their wet-black flanks bobbing as they swim. We glide towards them, arcing through high reeds for cover. Young elephants wait along the shoreline, eager to bathe, anxious about their ability to swim. Urged on by their mothers, they dive into the water, one after the next. With a splash they disappear and resurface, trumpeting happily. The evening sun gilds the water's surface, painting their hides red-gold.
"Beautiful. They make too much palaver, but they are beautiful," says my guide. With a soft laugh he adds, "just like my wives." |
|