Stephen Gray: Unspoilt places
After orientating oneself in the capital’s National Museum on Independence Avenue one finds the Botswana museum network offers two easy half-day trips out of the commercial city in which there is not much for a tourist to do. Both are attractive, if modest, involving the visitor in a way that Botswana manages with charm. There, cultural sites are important to people; they are abuzz.
We arrived at the first on a Monday, when it was officially closed. But that did not mean the resident curatrix was going to miss a chance to open all four rooms as if insisting we enjoy her own home. Clearly, communal bustle, involving hooting, dirty- bush taxis, kept the property alive and transactive. Only much later was an annex unlocked and a few dusty curios displayed. Outsiders were not the point of the proceedings.
This was the Kgosi Sechele I Museum in the village of Molepolole to the north-west, on the road that peters out in the desert and which Elizabeth Marshall Thomas took, as in her magnificent account of 1959, The Harmless People. One cannot say that her subjects – the outlying Bushmen, or San, or Masarwa – enjoy much status in the collections, although their works are represented. This is in the Bakwena heartland, after all, settled by Sechele in 1865 at the crossroads of hunters to the west and missionaries to the north. The building itself was formerly a Bechuanaland Protectorate police-post, alongside Barclay’s Bank, renovated by the danish Volunteer Service a decade ago.
“They don’t even clean their yards,” our large lady in her tribal print complained of the little ones; worse, out on a expedition allegedly “they refuse to share their caches of water, stored in ostrich eggs, with any strangers”. Such frank slurs: dirt, cupidity! Not knowing my banna much from my basadi in those parts, I reserved my response.
Dry-stone walls, plastered with clay, coated with cow dung – this is the Botswana building style, and the interior of the museum smells resinous. The displays are eye-opening. For example, at the neighbouring Scottish Livingstone hospital – talk about colonial ravages – in the 1960s they had to cope with an epidemic of imported, gruesome endemic syphilis.
Seventy percent of the locals contracted the disease from eating out of common bowls. Left untreated, it would lead to the venereal kind and then raving lunacy. With the Bible, praise the Lord, came antibiotics too. Sechele’s people are still scarred, but saved.
I enjoyed the garden as well: crisp pomegranates and lemons in the Kalahari air. And outside the town is david Livingstone’s cave, where he did (or did not) bury a pearl for future generations to recover.
The other site is at Mochudi, 39km north of Gaborone on the main Francistown route. The village itself is more correctly a stadt, centre of the Bakgatla, famous for living in populous, sizy settlements – in this case on the floodplain of the Notwane River. Although corrugated iron has taken over from thatch, and cement from clay, and even if they now have names like Bo-Peep School and the Why Not Bar, hutments are still fluently embellished. The Phutadikobo Museum there has produced a wonderful book, Decorated Homes in Botswana (selling for a mere R120, from PO Box 397, Mochudi), that voluptuously displays these floating murals and courtly lapas.
To reach the grandly situated museum itself one must climb a goat track up to the plateau from the chiefly kgotla, where Kgosi Linchwe heard his trials. Take a large hat and binoculars. There is the gabled Mochudi National School of old, now also a cultural centre, active with silk- screening. I liked the schoolkids up from the valley lounging on the rocks, reading Hammond Innes. Above them, basking rock rabbits.
What makes the displays is the abundant photographs of regional life – by AM Duggan-Cronin in 1919, by the anthropologist Isaac Schapera from 1929 to 1950, and more recently by Sandy Grant, co- author of the book mentioned above. Take Cronin’s shoeless postman with his delivery bike, or the bogwera initiates, their heads awhirl with spikes, gee-upping their longhorns into a race. Or Schapera’s head- on portrait of Sophonia Plonyane, editor of Lentswe and organiser of famine relief.
I was followed through the halls by a cleaner with a broom who confirmed I was not nicking anything, as the gramophone had once been nicked, its absence making a curious space all of its own. Once I was left unguarded, I tried to right a collapsing gnu against the wall, which the desiccated landscape – or just taxidermy – had shrunk to a brown shadow of its former self. It smelt gamy, still toppled.
Museum visiting in Botswana may be time- consuming, yet it is a personable affair. I bought a Coke with a 20 pula note, and someone ran off through the euphorbias to bring 15 pula change. Then I had to produce two, and then a kind of treasure hunt of the domain was organised for the 50 thebe that should have concluded the deal.
And all the time we chatted about the drought, then the floods, of the Lady naomi Mitchison who was adopted by the community and assisted with soup kitchens … of life in my GP – Gangsters’ Paradise – seemingly remote, despite the old Transvaal border being on the horizon. All this under a moth-eaten Union Jack. Such raucous good humour.
Outside Mochudi is the site of Matsieng’s Hole. Not having the requisite four-by- four, I did not get to the actual navel of the universe, but the museum has caught it in fine photos. It is a pot-hole. Out of this pot-hole came no less than the creator of this world, long before old Adam and The Wreck of the Mary Deare. When he saw what a mess he had made he turned his back on it and disappeared whence he had come. The evidence? His huge footprints on the shining rockface. Since then the Batswana have made a fine job of running the show.
The best guide to idling about Gaborone is still Linda Pfotenhauer’s Botswana: Africa’s Last Wilderness. This measures out remote attractions with enjoyment and style.