Gweta

Gweta grew where water could be found at the northern edge of the Makgadikgadi, in a belt of grass, palms and baobabs between the salt pans and the mophane woodland. The name is usually explained by the large burrowing frogs that survive the dry season buried in the pan margins and call loudly when the rains come, a sound the village is said to be named for. Long before any settlement, the pans were a landmark on the hunting and trading routes north-west towards Lake Ngami and the Delta, and the great baobabs south of the village carry names cut into them by nineteenth-century travellers.

For most of its modern history Gweta was a Bangwato cattle village, one of a scattered chain of settlements dependent on boreholes, with families moving between the village, the lands where sorghum and maize were sown, and the cattle posts out towards the pans. Veterinary fences built to control foot-and-mouth disease cut across those movements in the twentieth century and shaped where animals could be grazed and sold.

The tarring of the road between Nata and Maun changed the village more than anything else, turning it into a stop on the route to the Okavango and giving the settlement fuel, shops and passing trade. In recent decades the pans themselves have become a destination, and camps and lodges opened around the village to run trips onto the salt, adding tourism to a still largely pastoral economy.

Gweta is a Setswana-speaking village of the Central District, and its social life follows the pattern of rural Botswana: the kgotla for meetings and disputes, the church on Sunday, and family gatherings that fill a compound for days at a time for weddings and funerals. Cattle are wealth, inheritance and standing as much as food, and conversations turn on rain, grazing, boreholes and the price of beasts.

The surrounding Boteti country is mixed. Bangwato and Bakalanga families live alongside Bakgalagadi, Bateti and San communities whose knowledge of the pans, their water and their animals underpins much of the guiding work done from the lodges; some of that knowledge is now sold to visitors as tracking and bush walks, which brings both income and argument about who benefits.

Music and dance at village celebrations are choral and percussive, with the setapa among the dances still performed, and traditional dress appears at kgotla occasions and national holidays. Visitors are treated with easy politeness, but the village is not a spectacle: greetings come before questions, elders before younger people, and permission before photographs. The baobabs that stand among the houses are landmarks with their own local histories, and are treated with a respect that outsiders do not always notice.

Gweta is a substantial village by the standards of this thinly peopled district. Days begin early and the middle of the day is spent in shade; cattle and goats move out at dawn and come back towards the compounds in the late afternoon, and the sound of the village at dusk is donkeys, dogs and returning herds.

The economy rests on livestock, government employment — the school, the clinic, the council — and tourism. Lodge and camp work, guiding, driving and maintenance draw young people who might otherwise leave for Francistown or Maun, and the seasonal harvest of mophane caterpillars and wild fruits adds real income to rural households. Rain-fed fields of sorghum, maize and melons are planted in good years and fail in dry ones, and drought is the recurring hardship.

Services are basic: a clinic rather than a hospital, primary and secondary schooling, boreholes and standpipes, mobile coverage in the village and almost none beyond it. Elephants and other wildlife moving between the parks and the pans sometimes reach the fields and water points, an ordinary complication of life here. Serious shopping, banking and medical care mean a bus ride to Nata, Francistown or Maun.

Food in Gweta is the plain cooking of rural Botswana. The staple is bogobe, porridge made from sorghum or maize meal, eaten with a relish of beef, goat or chicken stew, morogo — wild or cultivated greens — or dikgobe, samp and beans cooked together. Seswaa, beef or goat boiled long and pounded soft with little more than salt, appears at weddings, funerals and kgotla gatherings rather than as everyday food.

Phane, the fat caterpillars of the mophane emperor moth, are gathered in the woodlands after the rains, gutted, boiled and dried, and eaten fried with onion and tomato or as a dry snack; in season they are both a food and a source of cash for families who collect them by the sackful. Madila, soured milk, comes from the cattle posts, and biltong keeps meat through the dry months. Wild fruits, above all the marula and the fruit of the baobab, are eaten fresh in season, and baobab pulp makes a sharp, refreshing drink.

The roadside stalls on the A3 sell grilled meat, fat cakes and roasted maize to travellers, and bottle stores sell lager and Chibuku, the commercial sorghum beer, alongside home-brewed drinks made in the compounds. Lodge kitchens out on the pans edge cook braais and international dishes for their guests.