Tsodilo Hills Redux

Maun, Botswana
Oct. 4, 2008

This camping trip could not have been more different from the one last weekend. This time Tsodilo Hills was calm, peaceful, inviting at every turn save the extreme heat of the day. My guide friend Kitso from Desert and Delta Safaris accompanied me on this trip to introduce me to his sister, an Etsha 6 basket maker I wanted to interview. I was giving Kitso a lift to his home village for his 11-day time off from the DDS lodges.

Kitso had never been to the hills and on the way he told me stories of the San people, commonly known as the bushmen of the Kalahari. It was news to me that Kitso's grandfather on his mother's side was a San traditional doctor, someone who used herbs to heal people and "threw bones" to talk with the spirit ancestors about someone's health or life situation. He worked in a house in front of the medical clinic in Gumare, Kitso said, so that patients, in two stops, could have treatment that combined traditional healing with Western-style medicine. He recalled how his grandfather would take him on trips into the Delta; they would sleep under the night sky, in the open, beside the fire and listen to the sounds of the animals.

On this trip, I made it to the far side of Female Hill to the most sacred site for the San people. It is a distant cave where an eternal spring bubbles up. Kitso braved swarming wasps and moths to go in, down to the water, to wash his face and hands and fill his 1.5-liter bottle. I have had a strong aversion to wasps since I was a child. They stopped me from going into the cave, but that was not the only thing: It didn't feel like a place I should enter. I can't explain it exactly. My inclination was just stand still on a rock outside and look out over the Kalahari Desert. That's what I did. When Kitso climbed out of the cave, he shared some water with me, enough to splash over my sweaty face and neck. It was an important trip for him, retracing the steps of his grandfather and his father, and I was most appreciative of the chance to hear his stories. I felt I had made a journey into a psychological and cultural realm of Botswana seldom experienced by tourists. And once again my passion for African skies was rewarded. You can see the glory of the sunset.