D'Kar Arrival

ABSTRACT:
The arrival in Botswana of one intrepid mongoose. Observations of heat, dryness, and sunlight. Brief description of the town of D’Kar, to be expanded upon in later entries. Recounting of the first few days, including the village Independence Day celebrations: explanation of the kgotla, description of slaughtered kudu hanging from a tree, tasting of kudu liver, meeting and greeting of local personalities. Finally wrap-up, and looking towards the future. Request for emails.

Dear Readers –

I write to you from a new house and a new home – my own little flat in the small town of D’Kar, Botswana. An astonishing variety of bugs are flying, crawling, and scuttling around my house, keeping me company as I write. The heat of the day is still seeping out of the walls, an oven-like, ever-present desert heat that oppressed me when I first arrived, but has quickly become an acceptable part of daily life. The little yard outside is reddish-brown sand, with two brittle trees and a line of cacti – this, for D’Kar, is an unusual profusion of plant life. After all, we are in the Kalahari.

By now, my eyes have adjusted to the unadulterated desert sunlight; they have become familiar with a subtle new palette of ten thousand shades of sand. Lizard-greys, the hundred yellows of dry grasses, the gradations of silver-beige on a long acacia thorn. When I first arrived, everything looked bleached, distorted, pared down to the barest bones of colour and shadow. This is what I wrote in my journal, on the view from the airplane flying into Maun:

The land was flat, flatter than anything I’d ever seen, flatter than the surface of a calm sea. Flatter than a piece of paper. And it was dry: uniformly gold-white-beige in the early afternoon sun, dotted with acacias and low scrub, on and on in endless uniformity as far as I could see. The town was random, boxy houses connected by roads that were just slightly lighter ribbons of dust strewn upon that vast plain of dryness. No well-defined lots, no grey pavement among greenery. Just light-coloured boxes and light-coloured, scarcely distinguishable threads of roads, scattered heedlessly upon the veldt.

I felt a deep thrill at the strangeness of it, this remote settlement, the landscape utterly foreign to me. Can one imagine anything more removed from the Pacific Northwest? Here we are in the desert, in the Kalahari. There are fewer variables. Seen from above, the scantness of shade seemed incredible – how open, how exposed everything is! Not a tree, nor rock nor cave nor even a hill or dune to take shelter by. Nowhere to hide from the elements; only our fragile, widely spaced human shelters being baked by the sun, like little boats upon the open ocean.

I was greeted at the airport by G, my eyes struggling with the onslaught of light, the roads bleached and white, the houses bleached and white, the very sky seemingly bleached and white. Surreal. I spent one night in Maun, and the following afternoon (jet-lagged, heat-drugged, out of it), we drove to D’Kar – my home for the next year.

If you ever have the opportunity to visit D’Kar, do not judge it on your first impression. As G joked, somehow the villages of Botswana never found a good city planner. There is no real structure to the town – most of the “main attractions,” widely spaced, are along the one main gravel road. There are two stores, which are open whenever they choose to be open, and carry a highly uncertain stock of goods. There is the D’Kar Museum, a very good though very small museum about the Bushmen, funded by the D’Kar Trust (another one of the Kuru Family of Organizations). There is the vibrant primary school, and at the other end of the road there is the dingy bar, right next to the defunct petrol station. At times, D’Kar reminds me of a cowboy town in the Wild West of America – one dusty street, bits of garbage blowing across it, and one rickety donkey-drawn cart rattling along, carrying a family and their provisions.

Spread out from this main road, completely at random, are the houses of D’Kar’s twelve-hundred-odd residents. Some are brick, some are (strangely) log cabins, but the vast majority are made of mud and the trunks of spindly trees, with thatching or corrugated metal for roofs. These little houses are perfectly comfortable for the moment – and who needs to be indoors, anyhow, when the weather is sunny, dry, and warm all night long? - but I wonder how they get along in the rainy season. In a few months I’ll find out, I suppose.

My first few days in D’Kar were spent in a state of total confusion and extreme loneliness. I had the misfortune to arrive on Sunday night before the holiday week – we came into the town in the dark, and most of the residents were well on their way to celebrating the upcoming Independence Day (Tuesday, 30th of September). Monday was a bit of write-off because Tuesday and Wednesday were both public holidays in honor of Independence Day; almost nobody was around the office. Monday evening, G left to go stay with his family in Maun, and I was left in the guesthouse alone, without any contacts in D’Kar. I was armed with the knowledge that I ought to show up at the office on Thursday, and that in the meantime I ought to “go around and introduce myself.”

So, on Independence Day, feeling ridiculous, somewhat terrified, and still jet-lagged, I set off to introduce myself. I met the Dutch couple that runs the remarkable Naro Language Project in D’Kar (more on that later), and they in turn introduced me to the pastor of the local church, H, a robust Afrikaans man who was wearing a rather short pair of khaki shorts and riding a bright-red quadbike with the KFC logo emblazoned on the side. (As it turns out, the quadbike had been a gift from a South African friend, who had won it in a contest sponsored by KFC.) He announced that he would take me to the kgotla so that I could see the Independence Day celebrations, and gestured for me to get on the quadbike. I hopped on, and we zipped over to the kgotla.

Here I must explain what the kgotla is. My own understanding is still incomplete, so let me just give a brief summary – I’m sure I will come back to it later in the year. The kgotla is a place where the local court is held. Each village has one, and the village chief presides at kgotla meetings to decide, in discussion with the community, what should be done about all kinds of village issues. Sometimes punishments are meted out; sometimes consensus is reached about various problems or decisions; sometimes ceremonies, meetings, workshops, or presentations are held. Overall, the kgotla is an open forum in which any resident can voice their concerns and have them discussed. The D’Kar kgotla takes the form of a rough circle of logs erected around a twisted tree, which creates a striking, visceral, and somewhat creepy image. The uneven logs jut from the ground like a circle of jagged teeth closing around the barren tree, making it look like a meeting place for witches or demons.

When we approached it, however, it was lively and cheerful, stuffed full of schoolchildren in their blue uniforms who were listening to someone making a presentation about Independence Day in the middle. H dropped me off to have a look, and I stood behind the children, drawing hundreds of unabashed stares. I listened but couldn’t understand a word – the speaker was using Naro, the click-language of the local Bushmen – and after awhile I left the kgotla to join H by the cooking area.

I had already noticed the focus of the celebration and feast that was to come: outside the kgotla, hanging from a half-dead tree, was the roughly butchered carcass of a kudu, a large antelope. Huge sides of meat were hung from an overhanging branch, raw scarlet with marbled white fat, the flesh stretched over the long, splayed ribs. The entrails were spilling out of a crook of the tree, lumpy and waxy and covered in flies. A smaller tree held the legs, dark red and thick with muscle. Two young boys walked around bearing the severed head and forelegs of the kudu so that everyone could see them.

H was chatting fluently in Naro and Setswana and teasing the cooking ladies, who were stirring enormous iron cauldrons nestled in open fires, under the shade of some low trees. When I walked up, H requested some food, and a hugely fat woman in Herero attire brought over a ladleful of steaming kudu liver, thrusting the twisted grey-red-brown bits of meat towards me. I had never tasted liver of any kind before, much less kudu liver, but I scooped it up with my fingers and ate it – delicious! Everything I had imagined organ meat might taste like. She grunted and returned to her cauldron.

Presently a couple of men brought over one of the enormous shanks of meat from the tree, set it down on a fallen tree branch, and began unceremoniously hacking it into smaller pieces with some kind of machete. The chopped-up chunks of kudu were then passed to the cooking ladies, and they began stewing the meat, stirring their pots with branches that looked to have been broken off of nearby trees.

I spent my time talking with H, who was kind enough to translate for me so that I could talk a little with some prominent local citizens, including his co-pastor at the church, a village elder, and the chief. (The chief is a source of some controversy – he’s not a D’Kar local, but was “shipped in” by the government to act as chief – many would say because the government doesn’t consider the San fit to govern themselves). We ate thick, filling home-made biscuits, drank tea, and at last got our hands on a large bowlful of shredded kudu meat – again, delicious. I really enjoy game meat, when I have the opportunity to eat it.

I finished that day feeling exhausted by the strangeness of it all, but exhilarated by the beginning of my journey. It was, in retrospect, a very good introduction to D’Kar – the scene at the offices of the various Kuru organizations operating in D’Kar is quite a contrast to the earthy feast of Independence Day, though at the same time this “office” is certainly a far cry from any office environment I’ve encountered in North America.

I will save my descriptions of Komku for the next entry, but I believe I am starting to find my way there. It is a slow process, and it is only barely beginning – I imagine it will be some weeks before I can give you a clear idea of what, exactly, I am going to be DOING. But I am learning. This week I spent Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday out in the field with the community health project, visiting most of the settlements that Komku works in (New Kanagas, East Hanahai, West Hanahai, Grootlaagte, Qabo). The trip was invaluable on a number of counts – introducing me to the settlements, improving my Setswana, and having some fun with my coworkers. Full report hopefully to follow.

For now, though, goodnight. Everything is so new to me here – I can practically feel my mind expanding, pushing at my skull with the swelling of new ideas, new perspectives, new possibilities. Everything I thought I knew - about life, Africa, people, the world – has been challenged. Provided I don’t get distracted, expect a lot of blog entries… The one thing I don’t really have yet is a social life, so I’m stuck with a lot of time and a lot of ideas. For the time being, that suits me fine. I’ve been practicing yoga every morning and reading a lot.

Please email and/or write! I miss you all and I would love to hear from you.

Two further notes:

My second day here, I saw a mongoose. I think it was a good omen.

I am befriending a cat who lives nearby. I believe she is pregnant. I have been feeding her a mixture of tuna, milk and potato, and she spends a few hours with me every night – last night she even sat in my lap for awhile. She also likes to catch and eat the bugs that crawl around my house (bonus!). I have named her Melissa.