by Robyn Scott
At the reception, a jazz band played in front of the graceful thatched buildings of the Marang Hotel, and hundreds of flamboyantly dressed, loudly chatting guests thronged the tree-shaded lawns that swept down to the Tati River.
Everything began smoothly. The two men hovered at opposite ends of the lawn. Mum and Granny Betty, emissaries of peace, each made a cordial visit to the other couple. After half an hour, Dad and Grandpa had endured not so much as an awkward encounter at the drinks table. The ladies breathed easier: Seloma was well aware of the fight between the two men, and knowing the characters of both, he, of all people, would be sure to keep them well apart at dinner.
He did not. To Mum and Granny Betty’s horror, he announced, beaming, that he had seated father and son beside each other, at the top table. With his own parents no longer alive, Seloma had appointed the two white couples his honorary family: internal feuds forced to come second to the honour bestowed.
At this point, as Mum recounted the events of the day, I felt terror just listening. The image of the two titans of resolve and unflinching inflexibility, squaring up for an encounter at a wedding, was horrific. I knew no two people in the world who cared less for decorum, less for what the world and everyone in it thought of them.
Mum said, “I felt sick too.”
“What did you do?”
“What could I do? I went to Seloma’s table.”
“Aaah.”
But a year of fighting ended in a moment.
Forced together, Dad and Grandpa both spoke at the same time. And once they started, they couldn’t stop. In a stroke, Sel-oma had removed that great who-will-go-first barrier to reconciliation, and the pride of both remained intact. Soon all four were chatting easily and exchanging aghast smiles during the gift-opening process, in which the giver’s name was announced, then the gift unwrapped and, depending on its worthiness, cheered by the merciless crowd.
Several months later – when it was Dad’s turn to help Seloma with his own ‘Grandpa Ivor problem’ – Dad and Grandpa were still, miraculously, talking.
The familiar knock and ko-ko were the same. But this time, when we met Seloma in our doorway, he smiled only weakly. He looked ill with worry.
“Keith,” he said, “you’ve got to help me reason with your father.” Dad said, flatly, “There is no way to reason with Ivor.” Seloma, a teacher by training, was the headmaster of a school in Maun. He was also a smart businessman. Ayear earlier he had bought the rights to some prime land in the small town of Nata, which lay at the juncture of the main road to Maun – a crucial transport gateway to the increasingly busy Okavango Delta.
The road between Nata and Maun was sandy, narrow, and deeply rutted. If you were unlucky enough to become stuck behind a truck, overtaking could be almost impossible, as fine dust clouds billowed over the windscreen and severely reduced visibility. People still tried, and there were regular head-on collisions. It was the same road that, in the 1960s, Grandpa Ivor had played a crucial role in building, flying in employees of the company replacing what was then just a sandy track with a wider, built-up dirt road, opening up the delta to road traffic.
Thirty years on, though, the road was long overdue for another upgrade. It was now one of the only main roads in Botswana yet to be tarred, and at last there were plans in place to change this. Seloma had foreseen a huge increase in traffic, with Nata the obvious refuelling and refreshment stop. He’d needed capital to develop a petrol station, shop, and takeaway, and had approached Grandpa Ivor to go into business with him. Grandpa had procrastinated for months. Eventually, Dad had suggested that Seloma go into business with him instead. But Seloma had been adamant that he couldn’t renege on his offer; however difficult Ivor was, he owed him loyalty. Dad had dismissed, outright, the idea of going into business jointly with Seloma and Ivor. And that was the end of that discussion – and the end of another shortlived opportunity for Dad to get out of medicine.
Grandpa eventually put up some money, and a small shop and takeaway were built. But before they would install fuel tanks and pumps, the petrol company then demanded evidence of business activity. For this Seloma needed electricity, and the notoriously relaxed Botswana Power Corporation was six months behind schedule.
Grandpa said not to worry. He would take the huge generator that was gathering dust outside his ex-coffin almost-defunct furniture factory and install it in Nata. For months, he repeated the promise. And did nothing. Seloma repeatedly offered to fetch it. Grandpa said he didn’t trust Seloma not to damage it. “He’s a baby in the world of business,” he ranted. “Just left school. Doesn’t know what he’s doing.” Compounding matters, Grandpa then became just as unreasonably stubborn about providing the money to buy initial stock for the shop.
Seloma was stuck and desperate. And now, when Dad declared reason impossible, he asked for a loan.
Dad said, “Not if you don’t have power for the fridges.”
Thus, Dad’s first condition of a loan was that Seloma must take the generator when Ivor wasn’t around. “It’s not stealing,” said Dad, seeing Seloma’s look of horror. “It’s for his own bloody business.”
The second condition was that Seloma must never tell Grandpa that Dad put him up to the idea. “If he found out, we’d never speak again. Not even my child’s wedding would fix that one.”
Seloma said he couldn’t possibly go against the wishes of an elder.
Dad said, “Don’t be such a Motswana about this, Slo.”
They argued, in circles, lor ages. Seloma maintained it was wrong. Dad reminded Seloma that Seloma himself had sometimes criticised the unchallenged rule of the elders. As a teacher, he’d often said that the reluctance of Batswana students to challenge teachers could be counterproductive for learning.
Seloma sighed. “This is different.”
Eventually Dad said, “I’m not going to argue any more. It’s your choice.”
Seloma went away and thought about it. Then he asked Dad to help him pick a suitable time and date for the heist.
All day, we waited.
Grandpa returned from his factory, more hysterical than I’d ever seen him. “I’ve been betrayed…treated him like a son…and he’s crossed me…after all Betty and I have done for him…Bloody disgrace…Breaks my heart…”
Grandpa ranted for days. Everyone lay low. Dad refused to comment.
Dad gave Seloma regular bulletins on Grandpa’s state of mind. And for several weeks, until the worst of the rage subsided, Seloma remained silent. By this time he had some cheering turnover figures, which helped to thaw Grandpa into a state of grudging acceptance, if not warmth.
The Northgate filling station, shop, and takeaway thrived. For the first time ever, said Dad, Grandpa had a good business, with a good business partner.
Seloma was deeply grateful to Dad, but he also continued to feel bad about taking the generator. One day, not long after, he phoned unexpectedly.
“I’ve found an island, Keith,” he said. “I would like to get it for our whole family.”
The island, near Maun, was tribal land, and Seloma was arranging a ninety-nine-year lease for the family.
When he’d completed the lease negotiations, an expedition was planned. A few weeks later, Jonathan, his wife, Christine, and our two young cousins Daniel and William arrived in Selebi, exhausted after a six-hour journey from Johannesburg.
Dad said, “Count me out. I do enough travelling for my clinics.”
After nearly four years of flying, the roads to many of Dad’s clinics had been improved – some tarred, some resurfaced with gravel. With the car journey easier, he had just sold his aeroplane – which was difficult to maintain – and was now driving more than 800 kilometres a week.
Grandpa Ivor said, “I’ve seen it. Wonderful place. Beautiful! Great for tourism. Going to build a tourist camp, I reckon. Leave a legacy for the whole family.”
When we pleaded with Grandpa to come, he said, “I’m a busy man. I’m running a growing business. Nort
hgate first. Next Southgate! Westgate! Eastgate! I’m taking petrol all over the country. Don’t have time for this gallivanting.”
When we pleaded with Dad to come, Dad said, “I’m too knackered.”
Mum said, “Come on, Keith, you can’t always be so antisocial.”
“I’m not being antisocial,” said Dad, grinning. “I have to stay and keep Grandpa company.”
Half grimacing, half smiling, Mum shook her head in despair.
♦
So an hour before dawn the next morning, squeezed into Jonathan’s four-by-four – missing only the two men that the island ‘was intended for most – we set off northwest.
On the way up we sang, “We’ll be coming round the island when we come, we’ll be coming round the island when we come…”
Until Jonathan said, “I can’t concentrate on the bloody road.” Which was straight and flat, but full of cows and donkeys. Then we played the licence-plate game instead, each picking a number and seeing whose came up most often.
After four long hours, broken only by a wee and drink break in Francistown, we pulled up at the now busy Northgate petrol station, and collected, from Seloma, a map showing how to find the island. We drove on quickly, determined to get to the island and back to Nata for dinner. The landscape sliding past became increasingly dry and dusty, the only excitement provided by several fresh, steaming piles of elephant dung in the middle of the tar, which was striped with the occasional tracks of bakkiej and donkey carts that had driven on their rims in the road-melting midday heat. There was no sign of the elephants, which Jonathan tried to compensate for by telling us how once, in the days when there were only dirt roads in Botswana, they’d had to wait for two hours on this same road for vast migrating herds of wildebeest and zebra to pass.
After a couple of hundred kilometres on the new tar road, we passed Motopi, where the road runs beside the Boteti River, and where Grandpa Ivor had had his old camp.
An hour later we were in Maun. Here we headed deep into the bush, winding our way along sandy roads in the direction of the famous sparkling islands of the delta. As he drove, Jonathan gave a potted history of the area, over which Grandpa Ivor had so often flown in the old days. It was then, in the 1960s, inaccessible and virtually uninhabited: tsetse flies, which kill cattle and cause ‘sleeping sickness’ in humans, had kept herders and cattle out of the fertile, pristine delta area. But the government had since waged a successful war against the fly, and there were now numerous cattle posts – several of which we stopped at when Mum, who was trying to follow Seloma’s map, got us thoroughly lost.
While Mum pored over the map with the men who came over to help her, Lulu, Damien, and I peered at the small buildings and mud and thatch huts, trying to be the first to glimpse a novel interior furnishing to add to our list of favourites. Furniture was one of the first and most visible ways in which people in the villages and cattle posts spent their money, and through the windows or doors of the humble buildings it was not unusual to see rooms crammed with plush red Dralon lounge suites, extravagant wooden wardrobes with elaborate gold handles, and enormous beds covered in shiny polyester quilted bedspreads.
Found across the country, such incongruous wealth is mostly derived from cattle, the heart of the rural economy. In Botswana, you can own and sell up to three hundred head of cattle – collectively worth several hundred thousand pula – before being liable for income tax. Most families in villages and cattle posts own at least a few cattle, which are often used to pay the bride price, or bogadi. A few villagers own thousands. But generally, apart from quirks like a love of lavish furnishings, cattle wealth is not flaunted, but kept – sometimes too late in drought years – in the cattle bank.
Slowly, however, habits and values were changing, a fact lamented by Seloma.
A man with a thousand cows, he’d once told us, traditionally had the same food on his table as a man with one cow. “But now things are different,” he sighed. We were questioning him about the shiny new vehicles often seen parked on the dust beside small huts in the villages. Seloma shook his head. “That is just ignorance,” he said sadly. “People with money these days don’t know that the savings account should come first. And then the house. And then the flashy car.” Often the extravagant cars belonged to people who’d made money in the towns, returning to visit their home cattle posts, wanting status and to demonstrate success. Seloma said, “It is terrible to see.”
But Lulu, Damien, and I relished seeing the flashy cars parked in villages. And as we drove slowly towards the island, looking out for new specimens, we described our favourite sightings to Daniel and William – the all-time winner being a large silver Mercedes gleaming on the dirt in front of a tiny hut and a subsiding long-drop loo, next to an unhitched donkey cart. Here, though, the deep sandy roads prohibited most cars, and by the time we eventually found the island, we’d seen nothing more exciting than a few old bakkiej with high bars on the open back, just wide enough to fit a cow.
Jonathan stopped under a small tree in the middle of a flat, grassy plain.
There was no water in sight – and no animals, except for a few of the ubiquitous goats, nibbling at bushes. Mum pointed to a five-hundred-metre-long strip of land, which was covered in large trees and surrounded by a dry sandy stream. “That must be the island,” she said excitedly. She swung her arm to the left. “And that side must be our half.”
We didn’t even have a whole of a dry island – an island that wasn’t actually in the Okavango Delta, Mum reminded me as we walked towards it. “The outskirts,” she said, comfortingly. “Seloma says that later, in June, when the floodwaters arrive from Angola, it becomes a real island. But then we’d only be able to get to it by boat. So we’re actually lucky to be here when it’s dry.”
We ran through the sandy grassland and clambered up the bank of the island.
On it, the island seemed more like an island, and I began to feel better. The trees were beautiful: tall and thick-canopied, some beside the bank bending slightly towards the absent water. The dense, dry island brush crackled under our feet as we explored, tearing our clothes on thornbushes, clambering over huge fallen tree trunks, and jumping as startled unseen creatures rustled though the undergrowth.
Every few minutes, Mum, Jonathan, or Christine hissed, “Shhb.” Then everyone stopped, as the three adults whipped out their binoculars, peering at yet another new bird in the trees or undergrowth and passing the ‘bins’ around for everyone to have a look, before announcing that the exploration could proceed.
After exploring the whole island, and deciding that our side was definitely the better side with the better trees, we followed the sandy stream, which led after a few minutes into another stream. This one had water: not much water – a deep narrow channel no wider than a person – but water still.
Ecstatic, we stripped and slid in, the water coming to our shoulders as we sat on the sandy bed and floated in the gentle current, all seven of us spread out in a line. Here, from the tiny, refreshing stream, the tall trees and the birds fluttering between their branches, the bath-width channel somehow offered enough promise to make up for all the missing water. The world from it was grandly and starkly beautiful. I wondered, absently, if Grandpa Ivor could explain this to tourists.
Four hours later, well after dark, we reached Nata. After dinner with Seloma and Neo, eaten outside under a thick canopy of trees alive with leaping bush babies, we slept in little thatched cottages at Nata Lodge.
In the morning, before leaving for Selebi, we drove into the Makgadikgadi Salt Pans. These enormous pans were utterly flat, with vast expanses of shimmering grey water stretching to the bright horizon. Around the water was dry, grey, bare, flat land. And standing there on the pans, I felt smaller and more awed by the size of the world than ever before. The parked four-by-four looked like a toy car that might just suddenly vanish in the vastness. The figures walking around it, slipping on swimming costumes, hopping as bare feet touched hot late-morning sand, loo
ked like tiny cartoon people.
The salt pans are the largest in the world, about the size of Portugal, and are dry for much of the year. But for several months after the rainy season they become great, shallow lakes, teeming with algae – ideal feeding and breeding places for thousands of flamingos and hundreds of pelicans, which flapped and paddled aside as we waded and splashed far out into the water.
Fifty metres from the edge, we could still stand, and handstand, feeling the sun and dry air on our waving legs. Mostly, we just floated, though: on our backs, cushioned by the salty buoyant water, staring up at the huge sky. Which was all there was to see – that and the occasional large pink flamingo flapping leisurely across the bright blue. It was perfect; in such an empty place, anything more would have seemed too much.
♦
That evening, around a fire outside the cowshed, we had a final family dinner before the Jonathan Scotts went home.
Grandpa Ivor, as always, was the centre of attention, telling stories and, tonight, talking excitedly about the island. “Marvellous, marvellous place,” he said, repeatedly. “You’ve seen it. Must be developed…tourists will flock to it…it’ll make us a fortune. I feel it. And I’ve got good instincts about these things…Thank God for that Seloma. The man’s a bloody gem. Bit inexperienced, bit naive about business, but a real gem. Always knew he’d turn out well. I always had a feeling about it. Hey, Betty?”
Granny Betty nodded and smiled, momentarily raising her eyebrows.
Dad said, “Come on, Ivor. We all know you’ll never develop it.”
“‘Course I will,” snorted Grandpa. “Who are you to say what I’ll bloody do?”
Jonathan said, “You can develop it, Keith.”
“I’m not spending any money on any tribal land,” said Dad. “If someone powerful likes your improvements, you could be kicked off. Paid for your investments, but with no real recourse to complain. You can do it, Jot.”