Bring Your Fire

When last we heard from Dia she was riding in a "combi", a small bus, with a few dozen other people, some of them fellow Peace Corps volunteers, crossing the border from Botswana into South Africa, en route to Swaziland. Swaziland is an independent kingdom of barely one million people. This weekend tens of thousands of music lovers will gather there to camp and dance and sing at the tenth annual Bush Fire Mountain Music Festival. 

More than 30 musical acts will perform including "Blitz the Ambassador", "Bomb Shelter Beast", and, my personal favorite, the "Correctional Services Choir". This is not the type of story we usually hear about Africa on the news. Yet, there is this. Last year CNN said that Bush Fire was one of the seven African music  festivals you have to see. Seven.

Among the music lovers joining Dia will be her cousin, Walter Bayer. Walter teaches in a school in Lesotho, and this is the first time the two will be able to get together since they started their assignments last year. The two of them grew up around Adirondack campfires on summer trips that my parents would organize for the whole family. So this weekend, while we sit around our Memorial Day bonfire, I will get a very large smile thinking about two global adventurers from the same family, far across the ocean, hopping and bopping at the Bush Fire Mountain Festival. 

Swaziland Music Festival

For a country as little known in the US as Botswana, it is impressive that there are now 15 novels written in English about the country. I refer to the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, a series by the British author Alexander McCall Smith. It features Mma. Precious Ramotswe, an entrepreneurial minded woman who sets up a series of businesses in Gabarone, beginning with her own private eye agency. She has a series of cleverly laid out adventures, and the Handsome Man's DeLuxe Cafe is the most recent of them, published in 2015.

By reading the novels (they've also been adapted for film - not so good), we have gotten some flavor for daily life in Botswana. I'm always cautious, however, when a Westerner takes on the job of characterizing another society. So I started to look up native writers, and it turns out that there are a good number of Batswana novelists. The most prominent among them is D.P. Semakaleng Monyaise, whose masterwork Go Sa Baori was published in 1999.

Unfortunately for me, all of his work is written in Setswana, and as far as I can tell none of it has been translated into English. So for now, the First Ladies Detective Agency is the best we can do. I'll let you know how realistic it seems once we get there.

If you'd like us to bring you back a souvenir, we'll be happy to do so. But it won't be ivory.

When we arrive in Botswana, at Seretse Khama International Airport, this is what we will see.

It's a life size elephant statue dedicated in 2015. It weighs 5,000 pounds, is composed of the tusks of elephants that died of natural causes, and was created by a group of young artists in Gaborone, Thapong Visual Arts. (I think Ellen would get a kick out of knowing that student artists participated in this project:).

Why create this sculpture? Why place it in the airport? It sounds as if Botswana's leaders see their future as tied to tourism, and their tourism tied to preserving the nation's wildlife. Currently a third of Africa's elephants live in Botswana, and they are protected with the fury of a lion defending her cubs. It is illegal to kill an elephant in Botswana, but poachers can be killed with impunity.

The continuing threat to the elephant herd, and thus to Botswana's economy and people, comes from illegal trafficking in ivory. Even though an international treaty signed in 1989 outlawed ivory sales, growing demand from the new consumer societies in Asia have caused an increase in slaughter of the majestic beasts.

When he dedicated the elephant statue, Botswana's President Ian Khama said that he wanted it in the airport because most of the ivory that leaves his country illegally does so in the suitcases of visiting tourists. It's an awareness thing - I guess they do want us talking about the elephant in the room.

So - if you'd like us to bring you back a souvenir, we'll be happy to do so. But it won't be ivory.

African Presidents (but not Botswana's) Set Fire to Massive Piles of Elephant Ivory

African Presidential Summit Ends with Largest Ivory Burn Ever

There are 129,000 elephants in Botswana. That's about one for every 15 people. Unlike some other places in Africa, the size of the elephant herd appears to have stabilized. Nearby Tanzania has lost more than half of its elephants in the past six years. 58,000 animals in Tanzania were poached, their ivory tusks sold illegally overseas.
How do we know this? Well, if you're reading this on a PC or using any Microsoft product, you can consider yourself a small part of the Great Elephant Census, a multi-year effort to measure wild African elephant herds. It's funded by Bill Gates' one-time partner Paul Allen, who has funded 90 researchers to fly 285,000 over 18 African countries for the sole purpose of counting elephants.

You can read about this enormous conservation undertaking in this National Geographic article.

Great African Elephant Census

In the photo above, a soldier guards piles of tusks. These were stacked up in Kenya and later burned at a ceremony attended by many African Presidents. It was a demonstration of the commitment by these nations to stop poaching and protect the elephant herd. The idea was to show the world that they would not allow sale of the ivory, seeing this as a deterrent to further poaching. Botswana's president did not attend the ivory burning.

The politics of conservation can get pretty complicated. I'll try to delve into it and let you know what I find in future posts. Meanwhile I'm just imagining what it will be like to be driving our pickup and stopping to let a 10,000 pound mammal cross the road. They have the right of way.