Wandering thru Southern Africa, 1986-87

9:30 PM, Serondela Campground in Chobe National Park, northern Botswana Hugh and I are sitting around our campfire next to the Chobe River after dinner and a bottle of wine.   We are being serenaded by the howls and growls of wild African beasties out there in the dark night.   Six-year-old Jonathan is asleep.   Hugh and I engage in the following fruitless exchange. Will:   What message would you like to send to America, Hugh? Hugh:   Dear Mr. [Amerigo] Vespucci……. Will:   What do you think that Americans should do about South Africa? Hugh:   There is nothing Americans can do about South Africa.   There is plenty you can do about America! Sunset over the Chobe River.  View from Botswana toward Namibia's Caprivi Strip. Look, Will, you can’t be serious at a time like this.  You get me drunk on red wine, and you expect me to be serious.  I’m a very cautious person.  I’m a Namibian.  I’ve looked at the whole coloni...

UB Environmental Science Computer Room, 2:20 PM   Since arriving in southern Africa more than a year ago, I’ve had two very short-lived, meaningless affairs with white women, one in South Africa and one in Botswana.  The other night, I picked up a young Motswana woman in the bar at the President Hotel in Gaborone.  We went back to my flat for maybe 20 minutes of lust (“safe” sex, by the way).  It was hardly worth the effort.  Nothing against her personally – she seemed like a nice person.  But there was nothing there.  She didn’t ask for money but I gave her some anyway. Now that I got that out of the way, I can return to the life of a monk – hanging out in the library, drinking beer with friends, and lifting weights at the gym.     Prostitution was considered a problem in Gaborone but I never felt intimidated by the “good-time girls”.  I found them fun to talk or flirt with even if I didn’t want to do monkey business with the...

Saturday, 18 April 1987:   Visa Problems & Partying with Students   7:00 PM, UB Environmental Science Computer Room South African Visa Hassles :  Today is the 212 th Anniversary of Paul Revere’s Ride but Massachusetts is a long way from here so I’ll focus on my current situation regarding further travel to South Africa and my application for a two-year teaching contract at the University of Botswana.  The latter is still tied up in the university selection committee.  I should know something in a week or two – maybe.  With regard to South Africa, my original visa has expired and the agency that issues visas is giving me a royal run around.  It seems that SATOUR (the South African Tourist Board) is not endorsing my visa renewal.  So the Department of Internal Affairs wants all kinds of details about my proposed travels, the papers I’m writing for, the people and organizations I will be contacting, the nature of my job in Botswana, etc....

UB Environmental Science Computer Lab, 9:00 PM I’m trying to get caught up on my writing this weekend now that classes are over for the year and I have finished preparing my final exams.    We had the day off today to commemorate the execution of a dissident Palestinian Jew back in the days of the Roman Empire.    I’ve just returned from a restaurant where I ate a mediocre pizza and am now sipping a Castle Lager.    It’s Friday night and I’m having a virtual “date” with my ol’ friend, Glenda, back in Denver who is the recipient of this letter.   In a recent letter, Glenda had expressed concern about my safety and sanity.    Most of all she fears that I will get AIDS here.    I assure her that, to the best of my knowledge, there are no reported cases of AIDS among celibate monks.    As for my sanity, she is worried about the loneliness I’ve been experiencing over the past year in Africa.    Yes, loneliness sucks b...

  University of Botswana, Gaborone This year we have travelled many winding and challenging mathematical roads together.   Some of the material you have learned will be useful to you whether you continue in environmental science or not.   For example, statistical means and graphs will come in handy no matter what career you pursue.   Some material will be repeated in the advanced quantitative methods class in this department.   Beyond that, you may or may never again use methods such as the standard deviation depending on the type of work you wind up doing after graduation.   So why was it helpful for you to learn the material in this class?  I hope that it got you to better perceive and understand spatial and mathematical data.  Also, I suspect that you have become more comfortable working with and solving problems involving numbers. For many of you, this class has been a struggle.  I encourage you stick with mathematics and you’ll eve...

Gaborone, Botswana The big news here are the recent riots over a local female witch doctor (sangoma) who allegedly kidnapped a 5-year-old girl from the low-income Gaborone suburb of Bontleng more than two weeks ago.   The girl was later found unharmed in a shopping complex.   The police alleged that she had been abducted by a mentally-ill 16-year-old girl, not the sangoma.   However, another sangoma disputed the police version in an interview on a Radio Botswana.   He claimed to have retrieved the girl from the female sangoma’s house.     Government officials believed that the broadcast inflamed passions of those who think there was a police cover-up.   The local journalist who conducted the interview was detained by the police for disputing their official version of the incident.     In the meantime, an angry mob burned down the sangoma’s home on Monday night, 30 March.  On Wednesday morning our students staged a strike and planned ...

  UB Environmental Science Computer Room Some of my weekends here in Gaborone are full of activities which keep me in good spirits.   This Friday, for example, I went to a TGIF party put on by the American “community” in Gabs.   There I met some American friends who invited me to come over to their place to watch old Humphrey Bogart movies on their VCR.    The Botswana Defense Force’s marching band provided entertainment at the national team’s football match with Mauritius on March 28.   On Saturday afternoon, two American friends, David and Kent, walked with me to the new national stadium to watch a football (soccer) match between Botswana’s national team and the Indian Ocean island nation, Mauritius.  The game was bloody boring:  the final score, 0-0.  Other than that, it was a big deal for Botswana as it was the first international competition held at the new stadium.  Even Botswana President Quett Masire was there.  We saw him...

  UB Environmental Science computer lab “Ruthless People”, starring Bette Midler, finally made it to the Capital Cinema here in Gaborone so I’m heading down there tonight for some laughs.   You can get a good seat there for only two pula (about US$1.00).   I sneak in beer and popcorn (which they don’t sell) in my backpack.   Coming attractions include “About Last Night” with Rob Lowe and Demi Moore.   Movies seem to get here about a year late but who cares?   Ah, the simple pleasures of life in Africa. My friend Barend Toerien, the Afrikaner poet whom I met in Cape Town, recently sent me an insightful and humorous short story that appeared in The New Yorker last year. Titled “Official Americans” by Norman Rush, the story details the torments of Carl, a USAID official working in Gaborone, who is unable to sleep at night.   Why?   He is kept awake by eleven dogs that bark all night on the property of his next door neighbor, an official in the B...

May 1987, Computer Lab, UB Environmental Science Department My Saturday in Durban was relatively uneventful.   I shot some photos at the beach and later at the Indian market in Durban Central.   Helize joined me for a big curry lunch at an Indian restaurant near the beach.   I learned that Helize is working on a masters in English because she feels Afrikaans is a dying language and thinks she may eventually be unemployable without another teaching specialty.   Spending time with Helize made me realize the extent of one’s internal conflict and subconscious guilt as a liberal Afrikaner.   In the eyes of most of her fellow Boers, to be liberal and an Afrikaner is to be a traitor to the Volk .   In the eyes of many non-white South Africans, to be a liberal Afrikaner is irrelevant. South Beach, Durban.  The only non-white I saw there was the black nanny in the blue dress on the left who was walking with a little white girl.   Helize’s gay friend, Kev...

May 1987, University of Botswana, Environmental Science computer room My main purpose for being in Empangeni was to visit another of Helize’s innumerable contacts.   His name was Etienne, and he was a colleague of hers – an Afrikaans professor at the University of Zululand.   I found the campus, located about 20 km south of Empangeni on the N2 highway.   Etienne was in his office and I had a short chat with him and Jeanette, one of his colleagues.   She had once taught at the University of the North in the Venda homeland in northern Transvaal province.   Jeanette confirmed my suspicions that it is a grim place to work or be a student as reported in my 3 October 1986 story and based on my very brief stop there.   As with most of the black homeland universities, many of the staff members are Afrikaners, and not very enlightened ones at that.   Modern campus buildings at the University of Zululand.   Etienne and Jeanette accompanied me to the Geogr...