Delta Blues

The Okavango Delta is Mother Nature’s party trick. An audacious splash of green, brimming with curious, colourful life, pulled out of the harshest, driest place of all: the mighty Kalahari desert.

Like all good party tricks, the Delta has presented us with one stunning surprise after the next. On an assignment for the BBC, my colleague John Murphy and I have driven from Maun, at the bottom of the Delta, along its western shores to the pan handle at the top. There we watched, awestruck, as hundreds of elephants appeared silently from the bush and crossed the road for their evening drink.

We’ve seen a priest baptise three young men with a full-body dunking in the sacred waters of the Cubango River, and heard the enthusiastic congregation singing and banging drums on the shore, praising God to scare off the crocodiles. From a dug-out canoe (known as a “mokoro”) we’ve photographed horses, cows, donkeys, countless birds and a carpet of water-lilies. At one point I suspect that even John, a seasoned hack who’s spent 30 years travelling to some of the world’s most remote, beautiful corners, got a lump in his throat. “We are so lucky to see this,” he said.

Mother Nature keeps the source of her magic well-hidden in the remote Planalto highlands of Angola, more than 1,000km away, where the water that will eventually nourish the Delta emerges silently from peat lands that few humans have ever visited. A lace-work pattern of streams gather to form the Cuito River, which flows south to Namibia where it joins the Cubango. The river will never reach the sea, instead spilling into a tectonic trough to form the Okavango Delta.

There is nowhere better to contemplate the Okavango than from the top of the Tsodilo Hills, an area of rock formations which rises out of the vast, flat, semi-arid landscape of the Kalahari desert. In the hazy light of sunrise, the Delta is just a green smudge on the horizon, about 40km to the east. Its shimmering water channels feel like a world away.

I’m here producing a documentary for BBC Radio, hence all the driving; radio budgets don’t stretch to private jets, ruling out the majority of the Delta’s best-known lodges, but affording us the opportunity to explore parts of the area fly-in-fly-out visitors don’t get to see. John and I have been sent to look at how communities are dealing with the rising number of elephants in the Okavango. Climate change and human development are forcing herds into smaller areas, driving what’s called human-wildlife conflict.

But we’ve discovered a far greater threat to the animals and humans of this delicate ecosystem: development. Oil, gas, mining, agriculture, population growth, urban sprawl are all emerging upstream, in Namibia and Angola, and they threaten to pollute or remove the water that makes this jewel in the desert possible. We’re in the Tsodilo Hills to talk about oil and gas, but find ourselves in the middle of an enthralling pre-breakfast history lesson from our guide, Lopang Majanga, who stops to point out grooves in the rock where hunter-gatherers sharpened their blades millennia ago. The hills have been a place of refuge since the Stone Age, with human communities leaving tantalising clues of how they lived in the tools, art and human remains that are buried here.

The local San and Hambukushu communities revere Tsdodilo as a place of worship and home of their ancestors’ spirits. Lopang proudly shows us the Python Watering Hole — a cave hidden high up in the rocks, filled with small birds and a pool of stagnant water. It’s smelly and dark but full of tradition and wonder for Lopang who says he has seen a python here on five separate occasions, which he believes embodies the spirits of his ancestors.

The Tsodilo range is a series of small hills called the female, male, child and grandchild. We are on the Rhino Trail, a smart path with neat wooden staircases at the steepest parts, built with funding from UNESCO who designated this a World Heritage Site in 2001. Rhino Trail takes us up the female hill, which is the highest point in the whole of Botswana, but still an easy 45 minute climb. At every turn we find 3,000-year-old cave paintings of lion, elephant, giraffe, wildebeest, and even whales and penguins, which it’s thought were drawn by tribes who had seen the sea.

This extraordinary gallery is one of the highest concentrations of rock art in the world and led one of the first travel writers to come here to christen it “the Louvre of the desert”. Lopang tells us how locals warned the writer that he must pay tribute to the ancestors before photographing one of the grandest of the paintings — a large lion, high up. He ignored their warnings and set about framing his picture. But his camera jammed, Lopang tells us, and only worked again when he’d made a sacrifice. I sneak a peek at the camera on my phone, which appears to be fine. Perhaps the spirits are used to photos by now.

A juvenile puff adder hurries across the path, vervet monkeys fight in the trees above, as Lopang shares his memories of the dry hillside. “This is where we used to collect water, but now it’s dried up because we didn’t get a lot of rain. When we were young there were no taps, no water pumps, so we would ride into
the hills on donkeys with bottles to fetch the water.”

This childhood memory should belong to an old man, but Lopang is only in his late twenties. Modern life is arriving slowly in this quiet, hot corner of the world, so it’s little surprise that many local people welcome the very development that could destroy this delicate ecosystem. At the top of the hill Lopang points out the boundary of the license area that has been granted to a Canadian company, Reconnaissance Energy Africa (ReconAfrica) to explore for oil and gas in Namibia and north-west Botswana, upstream of the delta.

The company is yet to announce that it has found anything and earlier this year it pulled out of Namibia. But in June a spokesperson told National Geographic that they plan to drill again later this year and “remain committed to the search for oil at the invitation of the governments of Namibia and Botswana”. National Geographic’s coverage of local communities’ ongoing battle against ReconAfrica is well worth a read. It documents how experts believe the company has “failed to line oil waste pits with plastic to prevent groundwater contamination and has repeatedly drilled before securing all legally required water and land use permits”.

Lopang is worried that the elders in his community don’t understand the environmental risk posed by oil and gas exploration, let alone production. “They just accept it,” he says. “They say, ‘It’s good. Maybe our kids will be working.’ But when you look at the job opportunities, you find that [the companies] will be looking for engineers which we don’t have in our community — none of the youth has done engineering. The only thing we will be qualified for are security jobs which don’t pay much money.”

We visit a local elder to check out this claim. Xontae Xau is chief of the nearest San village. He’s a thin, wirey man with leathery skin, small, piercing eyes and a huge smile. He has ten children, the smallest of whom play in the sand while the older girls wash laundry, braid each other’s hair and thread dried seeds into jewellery to sell at the Tsodilo Hills visitor centre. His wife sits on the floor smoking. A dog sleeps in the hot sand.

We find shade under a tree and sit down to do our interview. Chief Xau isn’t sure how old he is. His identity card puts him at 62 but he suspects he’s older. His life has changed significantly since he was a young man. Life, he says, is better now that he doesn’t have to spend his days in the bush hunting and gathering. He works as a tourist guide, alongside a little subsistence agriculture, while his wife makes jewellery.
“This life is better,” he says. “Hunting wasn’t easy. You could go the whole day without seeing anything, track an animal for 35 kilometres without seeing it.”

When we ask him how the harvest is looking this year his smile fades, the deep lines around his eyes turning downwards. The rain has been poor he explains and he’s worried about how they’ll survive.

“In all the years I’ve been here I’ve never seen the rain behave like this.” He points to the Tsodilo Hills. “You see those mountains over there? They are very sacred. Lots of people are coming to pray there, to wash away their sins. And we don’t know what they are doing. Maybe they’ve made the ancestors unhappy which has made the rains not come. That’s my suspicion.”

We move on to oil and gas. I can’t help wondering what Chief Xau thinks the ancestors would make of giant rigs and booming drills shaking the ground around Tsodilo, but we stick to his own view of that prospect.

“It is confusing us,” he says. “My opinion is that this oil money is a good thing, but others say it is not. Then we look at the mines in South Africa. Why do people say it’s not a good thing on our side, when on that side it is happening? They are enjoying seeing us living with poverty. They don’t want us to develop! After the mining they will leave all their tools and caravans and machines, which is good for us. But I’ve also heard that their machines will damage our boreholes and then I get angry because I don’t want to lose my borehole, I don’t want to lose my cows.”

The thing Chief Xau does want is more tourism. Lopang, the young Hambukushu, agrees with his San elder. “Half of our young people have studied tourism, but they’re sitting with certificates doing nothing,” he says. “People want to come and see the rock paintings, the views, the wildlife and that’s what we need to encourage — employment of our people as guides, chefs, housekeepers, waiters. That’s the potential we want, to protect our environment and this sacred place.”

There doesn’t seem to be any reason why the Tsodilo Hills shouldn’t become a tourist centre. It’s the perfect spot from which to explore the Kalahari, the Delta and the Hills themselves. But any development must be carefully managed, and for the government 1,200km away in Gaborone, a few new lodges certainly aren’t going to be lucrative as fast as a fossil fuel windfall.

Back at our lodge, an hour’s drive from Tsodilo, through the pristine, semi-arid peace of the Kalahari, we mull everything over with Willemien le Roux, a Motswana who left for South Africa in her early twenties, returning a few years later, in the Nineties, when her husband, a church minister, decided he wanted to serve the San people. Pregnant with their third child, Willemien and her husband spent six months living in a San village, sleeping in a small round hut, eating only what the San taught them to hunt and gather, save for a few rusks Willemien used to slip to their bewildered small children.

After 35 years of working with the San, Willemien founded the Pabalelo Trust, operating from her small farm on the banks of the Okavango Delta, helping local subsistence farmers adapt to challenges like climate change and human-wildlfe conflict. Willemien, now in her seventies, retired from it only last year. She’s tall and fit, with blue eyes that sparkle, especially when she talks about her late husband. Her daughter, Hettie, and son-in-law Dammann, have built the pretty Askiesbos tented camp on the farm where we are staying. The beautifully decorated tented rooms have outdoor bathrooms and verandahs overlooking the water. This evening we’re spending the night aboard one of their houseboats moored nearby, the Delta Belle.

Willemien is gloomy about the future of the Delta. She says that she has seen water levels and quality fall dramatically over the past 20 years. “It used to be a clear stream,” she says. “You could even see the hippo tracks on the bottom. If nothing is done to help, it won’t last. The Delta will probably become just a trickle. I guess the river will survive but the floodplains will shrink and just become a main stream”

Apart from climate change, Willemien blames the recent construction of a new multimillion-dollar bridge just up the road at Shakawe, as well as developments in Angola and Namibia. Mining, she fears, is inevitable, but there isn’t a culture of activism here to fight it. “We have to just sit and wait and see what happens with the Okavango Delta,” she says. “There’s beauty in the fact that Botswana is a very peaceful country and our cultures value consensus, visionary leadership, not confrontational leadership. People are listening to each other. They want to wait and see, that’s the culture. You cannot blame people for not standing up against something because they have to keep all their options open. It’s a survivalist mentality. It’s a survivalist technique to take things day-by-day and not try to think beyond that. So little is in our control here, we have to take what we see.”

On that note we set off on the Delta Belle houseboat. If the Tsodilo Hills is the perfect place to contemplate the mystery of the delta, this is the perfect way to enjoy its beauty. As we glide through the water, as still and shiny as glass, papyrus plants sway gently in the evening breeze. A fish eagle circles, a malachite kingfisher bobs on the end of a reed — splendid, proud ornaments, Mother Nature at her most glorious. This place is truly magical. You must visit it — while it’s still there.

Words by Charlotte Ashton

Askiesbos, Samochima Bush Camp, Shakawe, Botswana.
Visit: www.samochimabushcamp.com
Listen to Charlotte and John’s documentary, ‘Botswana: Living with Elephants’, BBC Radio 4 Crossing Continents, wherever you get podcasts.

DELTA BLUES