Tsodilo

Michael and I have just emerged from a torrid several weeks of responding to our UK editor’s suggestions for the third Detective Kubu mystery, Death of the Mantis.  The suggestions were excellent and have improved the book.  Of course, there was a short deadline because she wants to bring the South African edition out in May.

Death of the Mantis has as its back story the plight of the bushmen in the Kalahari.  However I’m not going to discuss that in this blog – perhaps later, after the current set of lawsuits has run its course. 

In our book we have created a fictitious place in the middle of the Kalahari, which we call The Place.  It is revered by Bushmen, who regard it as the most important religious and cultural site in their world.  In the real world, there is a similar place in the Kalahari, that the Bushmen regard as the birthplace of Mankind. 

The Male hill

It is called Tsodilo, and comprises four hills that rise abruptly out of the desert in northwest Botswana.  The largest hill is called The Male by the Bushmen.  It is the highest point in Botswana at 1,400 metres above sea level, rising 410 metres above the surrounding desert.  Then there is The Female; then The Child.  The fourth hill has no name, although it is thought to be the Male’s first wife, whom he left for the taller Female. 

The Female hill

The Tsodilo hills area was proclaimed a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2001.  The preservation is only 10 sq. km in extent (about 3.6 sq. miles).

There are probably two reasons for this proclamation.  First it has seen human habitation for 100,000 years.  The original inhabitants were probably the Bushmen, who are generally acknowledged as being the First People of the Kalahari.  There have also been a number of Black tribes, such as the Hambukushu, who have lived in and around the hills.  All of them regard the hills as sacred.

The Bushmen believe that the gods made mankind at Tsodilo.  They point to the knee-like impressions on The Male – the most sacred of all places - where the First Spirit knelt and prayed after creating men and women.  They believe that their ancestors and gods live in the caves and overhangs of The Female.  Similarly, the Hambukushu believe that their tribe and its livestock were put on earth at Tsodilo by their god, Nwambe.  They point to the hoof prints in rock on The Female in support of their belief.

The second reason for the proclamation of Tsodilo as a World Heritage Site is the stunning rock paintings – over 4500 in all.  Although I have not been able to find consensus as to their age, guestimates range from the oldest being 20,000 years old to being 2,000 years old.  It is probably one of the two or three richest sites on the planet for such art.

It is not only the number of paintings that is remarkable, but they frequently are of a different style than other sites, the nearest of which is 250 kms away.  When I went there, the most stunning painting I saw was that of two whales next to a penguin.  One whale is spouting.  The nearest ocean, the Atlantic off Namibia, must be 1000 kms away, across some of the most inhospitable and demanding terrain.

A penguin and two whales

The older paintings are in red, and the later ones sometimes in white – an unusual colour for rock art.  The red ones are made from red ochre extracted from hematite, which is plentiful in the area.

A common image at Tsodilo is of men with semi-erect penises.  I have read, but not verified, that it is typical of Bushman men to have a semi-erect penis as their everyday lives.  Some people think that the figure paintings represent a trance dance, which results in an altered state of consciousness in which, the Bushmen believe, the dancer can heal the sick and control the natural and supernatural.  The dancer can also communicate with the ancestors.

Bushmen with semi-erect penises

The highly controversial Laurens van der Post visited Tsodilo (The Lost World of the Kalahari).  In it he tells of when his party ignored the advice of his Bushman guide and killed a warthog and steenbok in sight of Tsodilo, which upset the spirits of the hills.  When they reached the hills, a camera inexplicably kept jamming, tape recorders stopped, and the party was attacked by bees.  These things only came to an end when Van der Post buried a written apology to the spirits below one of the spectacular rock faces.

I know Tsodilo is far off the normal tourist routes, but it is one of the special places on earth.  It is intensely spiritual, as well as providing a fascinating glimpse into the past.  If you visit southern Africa, I recommend that you put it on your itinerary.

Stan - Thursday

Commerce - Botswana style

Unity Dow

 

Michael and I just returned from Botswana where we were researching our fourth book.  (You may ask, where is our third?  Sore point!  It has been with our editor for 8 months!).  It was a very successful trip that included a wonderful interview with Unity Dow, first female High Court, current judge on the Kenyan Constitutional Court, and prolific author.  You must read Screaming of the Innocent. 

We wanted to talk to her because the third book Death of the Mantis has as its back story the plight of the Bushmen, and she was on the court that heard the famous case challenging the government's order that the Bushmen had to move from traditional lands within the Central Kalahari Game Reserve.  The court ruled largely in favour of the Bushmen although, as usual, the issues are more complicated than some of the Bushmen supporters (eg. Survival International) like to make out.

Our fourth book, in progress, deals with the harvesting of body parts for the purposes of witchcraft - they're called muti murders.  Screaming of the Innocent deals with the same subject. 

Botswana's formal economy is simple - diamonds and tourism.  Botswana is home to the two richest diamond mines in the world – Orapa and Jwaneng, owned by Debswana – a 50-50 partnership between Botswana and De Beers.  It is the revenues from these that have made Botswana economically stable. These two mines are modern, well run, and immensely profitable - when people are buying diamonds.

Orapa mine

Also important is the tourism industry.  Botswana has taken the approach of “low impact, high revenue”.  That is, they want a few tourists paying a lot of money.  Although fine for the environment, this also means that locals find it difficult, if not impossible to visit the great game reserves of Botswana.  Probably if I were advising the Botswana Government, I would also suggest this approach.  Actually in some parts of Botswana normal people encounter wild animals every day.  In Kasane, for example, it is not unusual to have elephants walking through town, disrupting travel.  It is a wonderful sight.  

However it is the informal economy that is the most fascinating.  One of the pleasures of roaming around Gaborone and Mochudi and other small Botswana towns is looking at the signage of roadside entrepreneurs.  There is nothing slick about it, but there is enormous appeal.  When Kubu drives through Mochudi to visit his parents, for example, this is typical of what he would see.

Garage

Garage

Tuckshop

Where's Part 1?

Caterer

Here's Part 1

Where's Part 2?

Barbershops are big business in Botswana.  Unfortunately we could not photograph our favourite place – the sign had disintegrated – the Taliban Hair Cut and Car Wash.  But the other signs give you the idea!

 

 

 

 

Stan - Thursday

Update:

Earlier in the year I wrote about Kulula Airlines in South Africa (http://murderiseverywhere.blogspot.com/2010/08/love-to-fly.html) and the innovative approach they take to keep passengers entertained.  On Tuesday, I flew from Johannesburg to George on Kulula, and was I in for a treat.  As the doors shut, the lead flight attendant asked the passengers to welcome a staff member, Kay Lula, who had just returned to duty from having triplets.  Could we give her a big round of applause?  Which we dutifully did.  She then said that Kay would handle all the announcements thereafter.  At that moment, Kay emerged from the cockpit, all six feet of her!  Tall, elegant, attractive, she caught the attention of the male passengers.  She then proceeded to give one of the funniest cabin briefings I have ever heard.  Of course I should have taken notes, but was laughing so hard that I forgot.

Once en route, Kay came back on the intercom to invite all kids and any adults to join her at the back of the aircraft to have their faces painted, free of course.  I wasn’t surprised to see several kids dash back, but I was taken aback by the fact that several adult Hasidic Jews, yarmulkes and all, headed back there for their decorations.  It was weird to sit there looking at people wearing yarmulkes painted like Long John Silver and other literary reprobates.

Before landing, Kay told some very funny jokes – that unfortunately don’t work in print.  And as the plane  rolled to a stop on the tarmac at George, she thanked us, hoping we "didn’t find the flight a drag!"

Fly Kulula!

Getting it Right

Kubu's house?

Stan and I have just returned from a short visit to Gaborone in Botswana. We were researching our fourth book. Much of our time was spent talking to interesting people about issues that range from police procedures to Bushman land rights in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve and murders for witchcraft. This is the really important stuff: developing a balanced understanding of the issues facing the country, what people there think about them, and how they impact the culture. It’s essential for us to put the time and work into that because although Botswana shares much with South Africa, it is a very different culture and society and we feel that it’s critical to reflect that appropriately in our novels. We never write about any place or town where we haven’t been and spent some time. We try to learn about the place, how it originated, what sort of people live there and so on. We also feel it’s important to get the small things right – street names, political parties, the names of the road-side stalls. Sometimes we get embarrassingly finicky about detail. On this visit, we made a special trip to the airport to check out the current colors and models of rental cars...



So the question is: why? Wouldn’t it be just as good to make all this up? Wouldn’t it possibly even be better, allowing us more freedom? Why spend all this time on detail when we could be getting on with writing the story?

I’m sure you are now expecting a carefully reasoned defense of the importance of doing all this work. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I’m not really all that sure why we do it.  We just feel much more comfortable reflecting things as they are – at a physical, cultural and political level – rather than as we’d like them to be for the convenience of the story.

A favorite restaurant in Kasane

The state that the reader enters when reading an absorbing tale has been described as “the willing suspension of disbelief” and also as the “fictional dream”. I really like the latter phrase. It conjures up an image of the reader drifting into a different reality which flows smoothly and believably.  For me, nothing interrupts the dream as completely as some fact that I know is wrong. Flying from Johannesburg to Cape Town in half an hour? It can’t be done – it’s a thousand miles. Thompson’s gazelles in the Chobe Game Reserve? They only occur much further north. Two minutes on the internet is all it takes to get that sort of stuff right. Of course these things matter to me, but 99% of readers not only wouldn’t know they are wrong but wouldn’t care if they did. In reality, a novel is about the story and the characters.


Goodluck Tinubu's school in Mochudi
Photo: Peter Muender



Sibusiso's office is somewhere here

 Of course, Stan and I have backgrounds in academia. Research for both of us is a matter of getting things right and hopefully deducing insights from that. And there is also the fun of coincidence. Often we write first and then check out the location or situation on our next trip. In our fourth book we need a school of the right level from which you’d walk past open bush, past some shops, to not very affluent homes. We spent a day looking at appropriate schools and found one that fitted our image almost perfectly. Now we can use its name and have a street for the character's home. Maybe it makes no difference to almost every reader, but we feel that we can weave the fictional dream more tightly because we have a real location firmly in our minds. The density of that weave is important. Of course the characters and events are completely fictitious, it is only the backdrop that is real.

Somewhere in Kachikau

Maybe it’s because we’re South Africans writing about Botswana. The people who live there know more about the country than we do, and our books are read there. We feel getting it wrong would be an insult to those readers and an embarrassment to us.

THE gas station in Hukuntsi

And there are issues of detail that can have a big impact on the plot. The Central Kalahari Game Reserve is not fenced. If it were, the scenario that kicks off A Carrion Death wouldn’t work. There is only one gas station in Hukuntsi. That matters in Death of the Mantis. And be careful about those autopsies; the official ones are all done in Gaborone no matter where the death occurs. This is a big, hot country. Enough said.

Then again maybe the real reason is that we learn so much, and enjoy it so much, every time we go to Botswana that checking detail is just an excuse.

I’d be very interested to hear from other authors with murders elsewhere...

Michael - Thursday

The great white queen’s blanket

For the most part, there is little good to say about the colonial powers’ behaviour in Africa.  It was avaricious, brutal, and racist.  However, there are a few stories that have a reasonably happy ending – probably more by chance than design – but nevertheless worth reporting.  One of these stories is about Botswana, home of the intrepid detectives “Kubu” Bengu and Precious Ramotswe.

Jan van Riebeeck

From 1652, when Jan van Riebeeck landed at the Cape to establish a vegetable garden to replenish the Dutch East India Company ships en route to the Far East, until the early 1800s, when the English took over the Cape to protect their sea routes to the Far East from the French, the White population in the southern tip of Africa was largely Dutch, French, and German.  They enjoyed the use of slaves, both local (usually Hottentot) as well from Indonesia and other Far Eastern countries.  For the most part, the black tribes had not yet reached the Cape, but were settled 500 miles to the east.

Trek Boers

When the English took over the Cape, they began to Anglicize the area and outlawed slavery.  In reaction to this and because the Cape was becoming less appealing due to an increase in immigrants and wars with Black tribes on the eastern frontier, many Dutch farmers left the Cape in search of their own land, free from English interference.  This resulted in the Great Trek – a watershed in southern African history.  From 1836 groups of Boers (farmer in Dutch) spread throughout what is now South Africa, establishing many independent states, the most important of which were the Orange River Republic (Orange Free State), roughly between the Orange and Vaal rivers, and the South African Republic, more or less between the Vaal and Limpopo rivers.

Much of this was accomplished by force – the muskets of the Boers being far more effective than the stabbing spears of the various Black tribes.  It was also accomplished by making expedient treaties with local chiefs, who rarely understood what they were signing.  Duplicity was rife, with the Boers often ignoring treaties when it suited them, and chiefs giving the Boers access to lands that didn’t belong to their communities.  In addition, there was a major cultural difference, in that the Europeans were used to having freehold title to land, whereas the Black tribes occupied land communally, with the chief having the power to grant use.

Queen Victoria

Even though most of the land west of the two Boer Republics was desert, there were incursions by Boers looking for more land, as well as attacks on the Tswana tribe by the Ndebele from the north east.  Three Batswana chiefs, Khama III, Bathoen, and Sebele went to London and asked Queen Victoria to protect them with ‘the great white queen’s blanket’.  This resulted in England granting a protectorate over the area in March 1885, which became known as the Bechuanaland Protectorate.  Part of the Protectorate became British Bechuanaland and was eventually annexed to the Cape Colony, and the Protectorate was enlarged in 1890 to the current size of Botswana.  An unusual and perhaps unique aspect of British control over the Bechuanaland Protectorate was that all administration was done in Mafeking, which is not in the country at all, but in South Africa.  Are there any other countries where the de facto government was situated in a neighbouring country?

England and the Boers went to war at the end of the Nineteenth Century, and eventually in 1910 the two former Boer Republics, the Cape and Natal colonies united to form the Union of South Africa.  The Bechuanaland Protectorate and two other areas under British control, Basutoland (now Lesotho, and Swaziland, were specifically excluded, although provision was made for their inclusion into South Africa.  England dragged its feet with respect to the inclusion, particularly when the Nationalist Party took power in South Africa in 1948, beginning the era of official apartheid.

As the winds of change blew through the continent, Britain felt the pressure to grant independence to its colonies and to countries it administered.  On September 30, 1986, the Bechuanaland Protectorate became the independent country of Botswana, headed by Seretse Khama and his White English wife, Ruth Williams.

Sir Seretse Khama

At independence, Botswana was very poor – one of the poorest countries in Africa with a per capita GDP of about US$70.  Today, it is one of the successes in Africa with a per capita GDP of US$6400, largely due to the discovery of diamonds.  The first great mine, Letlhakane near Orapa, was founded in 1972 and started operations in 1977.  Jwaneng is the biggest of the mines, coming into operation in 1982.  All the major mines are owned by Debswana, a 50-50 joint operation of the Botswana government and De Beers.

Facts and figures:

Population (2009):  1,900,000 (146^th in the world)

Population density:  3.4/sq. km. (8.9/sq. Mile) (229^th in the world – 10^th last)

Size:  580,000 sq. km (225,000 sq. miles) of which 2.3% is covered with water (the Okavango Delta)

Capital:  Gaborone

Government:  Parliamentary republic

Currency:  1 pula = 100 thebes (pula means ‘rain’ in Setswana) (US$1 = 7 pula approximately)

Wildlife:  Spectacular

Queen Victoria and a desolate landscape probably saved Bechuanaland from the grasp of Westerners.  Had they known about the diamonds, the story would have been different.  It is a land worth visiting with spectacular game reserves and friendly people.

Stan -Thursday