KalahariLog

Khutse Park is on the eastern edge of the Kalahari Desert. It’s about 320km from Gaborone but only 160 of that distance is on a paved road. The rest is on sand/dirt roads, navigable only by 4-wheel drive. Like the Sonora desert, the Kalahari is a high semi-arid desert. There are many grasses, flowers, bushes, and tress (and don't forget the watermelons and horned melons). There are reportedly over 400 plant species represented and only the western parts of the desert are covered by sand dunes.

At the time we were visiting there were a couple of different types of bushes that were in bloom. Unfortunately, I didn't get their names. Fires are common here but they are usually grass fires that cover vast areas fairly quickly, leaving most of the trees intact. Last year there was a bigger and more intense fire in the south-eastern part of the desert. There had been a 6-year drought that killed many bushes and trees; the drought was eventually broken by substantial rainfall which led to tall grasses; after the grasses dried out, the fire, probably started by lightening, took out all the dead trees and bushes but also some of the living ones.

After the fire came the biggest crop of wild watermelons. The tsamma melon is the predecessor of all watermelons. It was cultivated in Africa over 5000 years ago and can even be seen in hieroglyphs in Egypt. The wild variety doesn't get very large or very sweet but they do contain water. The vines are huge with up to one hundred melons on one vine. While they are common, they are typically hard to find as most animals eat them. But as the fire drove away many of the animals and there was a record crop of melons this year, we saw tens of thousands of them all over the place.

We also saw the less common variety, the horned melon. It is really a cucumber and sometimes it can be found in US supermarkets (commercially grown now in California and New Zealand). Whenever I've tried it tasted a bit bland and slimy but officially it is supposed to taste like a mix of cucumber, lemon, and banana.

The native people of the Kalahari are the San, which means outsider in one of the native languages of that group. They used to be called (and still are by many) the Bushmen but that is now considered politically incorrect. The local word for the San is Basarwa, which means person who has nothing. Most experts believe that the San had been living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle for the last 30,000 years. They seem to have lived in peace with their non-San neighbors (like the Bantu-speaking tribes of Southern Africa) for thousands of years but in the last two hundred years their numbers have dwindled to near extinction.

A fairly large group of about 5000 Basarwa used to live in the Central Kalahari Reserve, which was originally created in 1961 to protect them. However, the discovery of diamonds by DeBeers was likely behind the forced relocations that Botswana used to move them out of the reserve in the 1990’s. For the last 5 years there is a high-court case about whether they should be allowed to return to their lands. Opinions are divided but most everyone agrees that what the government did was not good, if for no other reason, for the image problem that it created for Botswana. A very vocal organization called Survivor International has had a field day bashing the government and raising their profile as a result. Despite all the claims that Botswana is tolerant and racially integrated society, most Batswana look down on the San which may explain why they use the derogatory Basarawa designation instead of San or Bushmen. Many of the San actually want to live in towns, with running water, electricity, cell-phones and schools. But why can’t they be allowed to choose individually whether to relocate or not, is what makes the government seem at fault.

Just the other day, Desmond Tutu was speaking about the plight of the San people in Botswana. He said “I am concerned by reports from journalists that the San have been forcibly removed from their ancestral lands and placed in resettlement camps under unacceptable living conditions, and that those resisting resettlement have been abused, cut off from food and water, and deprived of their most basic human rights. Alcoholism, prostitution and AIDS have become issues with the San for the first time in their existence. I am concerned about reports that journalists have been cut off from the areas where the resettlement of the San is taking place.”