Episode 276 — Okavango Khwebe Wind and a Dorsland Trekker Angolan Odyssey

Die Dorsland — the Thirstland — is part of the Kalahari that has an interesting history when it comes to pastoralists. The San didn’t call it the Thirstland, for them it wasn’t a barrier but part of a network of seasonal resource nodes. They would navigate the dry spans using sip-wells, inserting long, hollow reeds deep into the damp sand, use grass filters, and literally suck water up to store in hollowed-out ostrich eggshells buried along transit routes for future journeys. Around 2,000 to 2,500 years ago, a massive economic shift occurred when groups in northern Botswana acquired livestock, sheep and later cattle, transitioning from hunter-gatherers to pastoralists—becoming the Khoekhoe.

Archaeological evidence indicates the Khoekhoe moved out of the northern Botswana/Zambezi region and split. One major migration route skirted the western edge of the Kalahari desert, moving down through modern-day Namibia and into the Northern and Western Cape with the Kalahari was the geographic pivot around which this entire pastoralist expansion rotated. Moving large herds of sheep and cattle through a Thirstland required moving between reliable pans and riverbeds like the Nossob, Auob, and Molopo rivers. They transformed the Kalahari from a hunter-gatherer landscape into a series of strategic grazing corridors.

The Dorsland Trekkers were going to reverse that course to some extent, using the north western Botswana region to reach Namibia, and eventually, Angola.

The Khoekhoe like the Voortrekkers, appreciated their freedom, moving in small extended family groups, their mobility part of their world-view. Instead of heading north west like the trekkers, they had headed south west for hundreds of years, arriving in Southern Africa about 2400 years ago.

That was about the time parts of south-central Africa experienced a shift in rainfall, forests and dense woodlands expanded or contracted, the tsetse belts moved. If you were an early pastoralist whose entire wealth, diet, and social structure depended on cattle and sheep, a shifting tsetse belt was an existential threat.

The arid margins of the Kalahari, the Namib, and the Karoo environments further south were too dry for the tsetse fly. The Karoo was a safe haven for livestock, the Namib too dessicated.

In high-rainfall, tropical areas, grass grows fast but loses its nutritional value in winter, it becomes sourveld. In more arid regions like the fringes of the Kalahari and the Karoo the grass grows slower but retains its high mineral and protein content year-round, even when dry - it is sweetveld. To a sheep or cow, the arid south was an open buffet of incredibly nutritious feed.

The Khoekhoe migration pushed into the Western Cape, where they hit a completely different climate zone, the winter rainfall region, so just as the summer rainfall area dried out, the Cape valleys were greening up. But where the trekkers moved northwards taking a decade and arrived Angola in 1880, the Khoekhoe migrations took hundreds of years. A gradual seeping south if you like.

After the Khoekhoe, and before the Boers, the people of the Ngami area near the Okavango Delta were known as the Khwebe - from the word Kwe which simply means “people”. They dwelled close to a geographical anomaly in Botswana - the Khwebe Hills — Botswana is one of the flattest countries on earth.

The Khwebe hills are a windy place and Khwebe mythology speaks of the Gas Bird which lives in a certain baobab near the upper Okavango River valley. If you listen closely, you can hear his hissing voice inside the tree. The mythology is linked to earlier San cosmology, where the word !Khwe means wind — and where the wind is a supernatural being.