serowe; boxing giraffes; hungry like a lion

After being given a stern talking-to on the subject by a friend who's a tour operator, I finally made it up to the Khama Rhino Sanctuary (KRS), which is outside Serowe. Serowe is famous as the latter-day (i.e., this century) capital of the Bamangwato, the largest (dare I say largest?) and most (dare I say most?) powerful 'tribe'/ 'ethnic group' / whatever in Botswana. Sir Seretse Khama, the first president of the Republic of Botswana, was also in line for the hereditary chieftaincy of the Bamangwato. He abdicated the position in order to throw his lot in with the Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) instead. Serowe, as one of my companions said only half-jokingly, is the centre of power in Botswana.

I had been to Serowe only once before on an outreach trip with another anthropologist and a doctor-friend, and had seen no more than the brand-spanking-new hospital and a hotel where we had lunch. The highlight of that trip was chatting with the Chief Medical Officer of the new Sekgoma Memorial Hospital, who had grown up in a village in (now) Zambia. When I and and my companion introduced ourselves as anthropologists, he said, "Oh, I knew an anthropologist once! Have you ever heard of Max Gluckman?" It turned out that Gluckman had done some fieldwork in the village where this doctor had grown up. How cool is that?

My friend B, his son (who was visiting from Tucson) and I drove up Friday afteroon. (Side note: What are the chances of a car full of Arizonans driving through central Botswana?) We had originally thought of staying the night in Palapye, but we were talked out of it (another stern talking-to...) by a much-better-informed friend. She advised us to stay in Serowe itself. The first hotel we tried was, it turned out, the place where I had had lunch the one other time I had been to Serowe. They were full, but booked a place for us at another hotel, which consisted of a group of rondavels, square-davels, the bar and the restaurant, all set into the rocky hillside. The hill used to be the site of the kgotla (customary court). The kgotla is no longer there, but the view was amazing. We went back to the first hotel for supper. The goat seswaa (pounded meat) was lovely.

We decided against getting up at the crack of dawn to visit KRS, so we didn't really get there until about 10am. We had been hoping to self-drive, but we were told under no circumstances could my friend's Toyota hatchback cut it. When we saw the depth of the sand, we understood why. We paid for a two-hour game drive instead. And during this game drive, we saw not one single rhino.

You can't always get what you want.

But, true to form, sometimes you can get what you need. B's son really wanted to see giraffes, and they very obligingly materialized out of the bush. We saw big ones and little ones, swarthy and fair, mamas and babies. And we saw giraffes boxing. Well, fighting -- but fighting in silence, in what seemed more like a slow, graceful ballet than a struggle for dominance. The only sounds they made were by striking each other with their heads and necks.

On the drive back to Gabs, we stopped in Mahalapye at 'Hungry Lion', arguably the cheapest and greasiest of the cheap and greasy fried chicken joints in Botswana. We took the chicken down the road a ways and stopped under a tree to eat it. The batter was spicy and delicious, the chips horrible, the experience unmatchable.

Here is a photo of the boxing giraffes. You can see the others here.

warthogs (a thousand words)

I found a picture that belongs with this post. This I can see from the garden. The more exotic fauna is still to come...

where the wild things are

Mozambique was beautiful. (I always want to write Moçambique instead because I think the ç is so pretty. And I loved listening to Portuguese, which involves all these pretty zhuh-zhuh-zha sounds.) We partied pretty hard on Friday night, so we spent Saturday restoring ourselves at a fabulous little cafe, taking a little driving tour of Maputo, and hanging by the pool, listening to waves crash on the beach below. Saturday evening we went out for steak, and then dropped by the train station -- gorgeous, and supposedly designed by Eiffel -- to listen to some live jazz.

We left Moçambique Sunday morning. It's a 10-hour drive, not including stops. We got back to Gabs around half past eight in the evening. I had to get up on Monday for the first day of a week-long conference on paediatric HIV. When I got home yesterday evening, I crashed in front of the fourth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer for a while, took a hot bath, and slept like a log.

I got up this morning, and walked into the kitchen to make tea. When I saw broken glass on the floor my heart started racing and I began to shake: I had left my laptop in the living room before I had gone to bed. Dissertation! data! disaster! Someone must have broken in!

First, I looked to the table where I'd left my computer, and it was still there. Second, I noticed that all of the windows were intact. Third, there were -- now that I looked -- white splotches all over the floor, the table, and my computer.

Then I heard a noise...

I looked up to see a barn owl sitting in the rafters. It was staring at me from its perch high in the roof beams. It was beautiful, with such large eyes in its white face. It flew from beam to beam, and then suddenly swooped down, thumping against one of the windows in an attempt to escape. Its wingspan was enormous.

Now for the back story: An owl had gotten into the house about two weeks -- or was it only one week? -- ago. The folks from the local game reserve came out and collected it from the wine rack, where it had hidden itself. But they had taken most of the day to show up, and I didn't have time to wait. It was 6:20am, and the conference started at 8am.

I opened the living room's two sliding glass doors, retreated, and waited while the owl flew (painfully, to my ears) into one window after another: thump! retreat to rafters; thump! retreat to rafters...

Then the thumps stopped. I stepped down to the room and looked out into the early morning sky, but the owl was gone.

some reading for your Sunday morning

The meal:

a poem, French punctuation trauma, and my kind of (snarky) literary criticism.

... and for dessert: Stanley Fish on French theory in America.

There, that's my form of escapism from camp hope trauma, the owl trapped in the kitchen (no, I'm not kidding), and general post-party pandemonium.

Mozambique is on, by the way.

warthogs

It's been a very long two weeks, but here's an image to tide us all over:

This morning, I heard a noise as I was walking past the kitchen, and looked outside to see a warthog with two of her young (wartpiglets?) nosing around in the bowl of dog food on the veranda. They were probably 10 feet from me. I'm not sure who startled whom more. Although the warthogs ran away more quickly (with their curly little tails raised high in the air), the image of those formidable tusks stayed with me.

They came back a second time, but by the time I figured out where my camera was, they were gone.

a contest!

In honour of having slaughtered a wild pig with my car this past Saturday night about 30km away from the border post dividing South Africa from Botswana, I invite you to exercise your poetic wits and celebrate this tremendous occasion in rhyme.

For example:

Come here, come here, myopic pig,
I'll smack you good with my big rig.

What's more, I invite you to submit your rhymes in the language of your choice (or the language of your field site for ye anthropology types).

To wit:

Приди, приди, глупая свинья, (Pridi, pridi, glupaya svin'ya)
Ударит тебя моя машина! (Udarit tebya moya mashina!)

(trans.: Come, come, stupid/silly pig / My car will strike you!)

Or:

Tla kwano, tla kwano, kolobe,
Ke tlaa go bolaya ka koloi ya me!

(trans.: Come here, come here, pig / I will kill you with my car!)

While it would be most appropriate to reward the best poem with some tasty wild pork -- both SA and Botswana police and customs officials kept asking me where the meat was -- I'm afraid that I'll have to come up with something else.

N.B.: Killing animals that are property can be very expensive: cows are not cheap to replace, even if you survive hitting them, and the fault lies with the motorist for hitting the cow, not with the cow for being dumb enough to walk into oncoming traffic. But according to a friend, in Botswana, when you kill even a wild animal, you have to pay damages to the government! I am very glad that my pig, however damaging to my car, was at least South African...