Will Randall - Botswana Time

Will Randall

Botswana Time

2005

Will Randall travels with a purpose, as well as an outrageous sense of fortune. In INDIAN SUMMER he found himself, by chance, having the extraordinary experience of helping slum schoolchildren put on a play to help save their school. In Botswana he was taken up by a headmaster to teach a class of six year olds at The River of Life school. They are football crazy and one of Wills jobs is to take them to play neighbouring (sometimes as much as 100 miles away) schools. Camping en-route or staying in farms and rural villages, often travelling by foot or dug-out punts, thousands of antelope, elephant, buffalo and zebra follow their progress. The sound of lions, leopards and hyenas become the soundtrack of their dreams. Against all the odds they find themselves preparing for the Grand Final of the season the titanic clash with arch rivals, Victoria Falls Primary school. Both an endearing personal story and a travel book about a little-known but highly successful country, BOTSWANA TIME will win new fans for both Will Randall and the extraordinary country of Botswana.

D uring my travels through southern Africa I encountered far too many wonderful, kind and generous people to mention them all here. However, there were a number of people who helped to set my course and without their assistance I would never have made it to Kasane. In Cape Town, my friend Chef Didier helped me find my feet and Phil got them on the road. Tona Crookshank in Devon introduced me to Mark and Jane Bing through whom I met the Freeman family in Palapye, who provided me with a great insight into life in Botswana.

Many thanks too to all my friends and acquaintances, listed here or not, who made me so welcome in Kasane: the Rankin family, Heather Carr-Hartley and all my colleagues who made teaching at Nokya Ya Botselo School an unmitigated pleasure. Kibonye and Simon Healey were regular, generous hosts and I miss their delightful company greatly. Andy and Gay McGregor, and my godson Jamie provided me with one of the most memorable journeys of my life, plenty of hilarity and, finally, a very comfortable caravan on the Black Isle in which to write. Thank you.

In those rare moments that travelling loses its charm, it is a very great pleasure to be able to tramp down the drive to Exland where I am always greeted with the warmest of welcomes. My family, of course, continue to give me the most level-headed, big-hearted support. I consider myself very fortunate. Tanya again has produced beautiful illustrations.

Richard Beswick, Tamsyn Berryman and Kirsteen Brace at Abacus, and my super-agent Kate Hordern continue to supervise the turning of my wheels. Many thanks to Richenda Todd for her incisive but kindly editorial comments. Without their support, advice and great good humour the writing of this book might have been a less pleasurable experience.

Clearly, the main reason that it has been such a satisfying process is that it has given me the opportunity to tell the tale of the very remarkable boys and girls that I met in Botswana. I wish them all every good fortune.

The French Alps,

February 2005

S etswana should be pronounced as it is written. Its es are not silent Kasane, for example, has three syllables.

S liding slowly towards sleep, I closed eyes that stung with delicious heat-induced torpor. Of course, as so often happens, just as I was about to pitch towards that dark, comfortable chasm, I was awoken suddenly by obtruding noise. Above me the tin roof clattered and crackled.

The sound of fat, warm raindrops.

Pula!

Rain!

Had it come at last?

I pushed my wicker chair across the roughly sawn floorboards of the wooden hut, leapt up and turned to the window. My disappointment was acute as I realised that the African sun surely the fiercest in the world was still blazing down on the submissive land. As its morning rays warmed the galvanised sheets, they had begun to expand until they were fighting for room, bending and slightly buckling against each other causing this percussive rumble of sound.

Tantalisingly, away on the horizon in Namibia, I could see hill ranges of black, potent clouds rumbling and rolling, and spitting and glittering with spikes of electricity above the several hundred Brahman cattle and their ambling, stick-switching herders as they roamed across the river plain. Below me, my village a modern collection of neat houses, varied shops and grand safari lodges whose verandas extended to the river bank was obscured by dust-dirtied acacia thorn bushes. From where I stood the plains disappeared into a misty infinity; a vista that had changed not at all since these tribesmen had first brought their livestock from the west and north countless hundreds of years before.

As I turned to sit again, my reasonably practised eye made out two familiar shapes away to my right. Like badly drawn Ms etched on the side of the tan escarpment some few hundred yards away, the silhouettes of the mother and calf elephants, majuscule and minuscule, moved slowly across the clearing. Nodding with surprising synchronicity, they made their way down the shallow slope. Their serious, rather mechanical determination made me smile. Occasionally, hardly turning her head, the mother looked back to ensure her offspring was still following closely, for even in the heat of mid-morning predators prowled the forest of thick, shady thorn-trees.

Naturally the grey of cracked potters clay, but dusted darker now with the black mud of the last dried-out pan that they had found on their long journey from the Chinamba Hills to the south, the animals lumbered on. Instinct guided them, with other unseen hundreds, onwards to the cool, deep brown waters of the Chobe River. Soon they were heading almost directly towards me but seemed oblivious, in their quest for water and green vegetation, to the shaky wooden cabin in which I was standing.

A fallen mopane tree had collapsed into the track before them, desiccated and broken like a drought-stricken corpse; from its rib-like branches flitted a lilac-breasted roller, the glorious national bird of Botswana. Flashing its electric-turquoise wings and croaking rack-kack kacker in fright, it disappeared into the bush just before the cow elephant, with slow deliberation, slid her luminously white tusks under the main trunk of the tree and lifted the ton or so of wood off the ground, tipping it with a creaking crash out of the way. Ponderously she reversed a few steps and considered how much tidier things looked. Her calf raised his small trunk, curling its little pink tip, and poked the air in a demonstration of filial admiration. His parent allowed herself a slight affectionate smile before forging on.

Gusts of kiln-hot wind blew up eddies of dust around the two elephants knees, which appeared to disorientate them and cause them to diverge from their chosen route. Now, it seemed, they had decided to take the short cut through the small beautifully tended and carefully watered garden that surrounded the building. Paying scant attention to the white wooden fence, the pickets of which scattered like spillikins, they proceeded, quite unaggressively, to crush or consume the bright patches of flowers and ornamental shrubs that had stood out in such colourful contrast to the sweeping beige and brown of the miles of bush. Young Gabamukuni, our cheerful if not overly industrious groundsman, would not be happy when he got back from the clinic, not happy at all.

Really, I ought to do something, I thought.

Shooing an Elephant

There were various techniques. Some people always kept a noisy old aluminium saucepan and dented soup ladle to hand; others possessed November 5th quantities of pyrotechnics, strategically disposed, to deter these gentle but destructive creatures.