Kasane

The Chobe riverbank has been settled for a very long time, and the Basubiya are the people historically associated with this corner of the country. Their chieftaincy was established along the river, and the fishing, floodplain farming and hunting of the Chobe and the Zambezi supported communities well before any European arrived. The four-way meeting of borders here was fixed only in the colonial period, when the Caprivi Strip was drawn to give German South West Africa access to the Zambezi, leaving Kasane at the junction of what became Botswana, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Under the Bechuanaland Protectorate the settlement served as a small administrative and police post, remote from the rest of the territory. The region's economy turned on ivory, hides, timber and tsetse-fly control rather than on visitors, and the road links east and south were poor well into the second half of the twentieth century.

The change came with conservation. Chobe became Botswana's first national park in 1968, and Kasane, sitting at its gate, grew into the base for it. The tarred road from Nata, the airport and a rising number of lodges turned the town into one of the country's two safari hubs. Border traffic reinforced it: the Kazungula ferry across the Zambezi was replaced in 2021 by a road and rail bridge to Zambia, and the town remains a customs and transit point as much as a tourist one.

Kasane is a mixed town on a border. The Basubiya are the long-established community of the Chobe district, with Subiya widely spoken alongside Setswana and English, and there are Tswana, Kalanga and other Botswana families who came for work, along with Zambians, Zimbabweans and Namibians who cross the river routinely. Trade, marriage and kinship run across all four borders, and the mixture is audible in the languages heard in the shops.

Public life follows the national pattern — the kgotla for community meetings and customary matters, church on Sunday, funerals as major family occasions — but the working culture is shaped overwhelmingly by safari tourism. Guides, boat skippers, mechanics, pilots and lodge staff make up much of the workforce, and detailed knowledge of animals, birds and the river carries genuine standing. Many staff are from elsewhere in Botswana and go home to their villages at intervals, giving the town a transient edge.

Living alongside very large animals is the other constant. Elephants walk the verges and gardens, rubbish bins and fences are built with them in mind, and the national debate about elephant numbers, crop damage and hunting policy is discussed here with more direct experience than almost anywhere else. Visitors are expected to take that seriously rather than treat it as scenery.

About 9,000 people lived in Kasane at the 2011 census, with the neighbouring village of Kazungula adding some 4,000 more, which makes it small for a town of its reputation. Houses are single-storey and spread out under mopane and acacia, and the whole settlement is strung along one road between the river and the escarpment behind. Everything practical — banks, supermarkets, the clinic, schools, government offices — sits on that road.

The economy is tourism, government and the border. Lodges, camps, boat operators and vehicle workshops employ a large share of the town; customs, immigration and the freight traffic crossing to Zambia and Zimbabwe employ much of the rest. Fishing and small-scale farming continue along the river, though wildlife damage and park boundaries limit both. Wages in tourism are seasonal, and the quiet months of the rains are felt across the town.

The day starts early. Safari vehicles and boats go out at first light and again in the late afternoon, so the middle of the day is the still hour when the heat is heaviest and shops empty. Water, power and housing costs are perennial local concerns, as is the cost of living so far from the rest of the country: most goods arrive by truck on the long road from the south.

Everyday food in Kasane is Botswana's: bogobe or pap, a porridge of sorghum or maize, eaten with a relish of beef, goat or chicken and morogo, the cooked wild greens. Seswaa — beef or goat boiled long and pounded soft with little more than salt — is the dish for weddings, funerals and kgotla gatherings, and dikgobe, samp and beans, is a common everyday plate. Braai, grilled meat over coals, is the social meal, as it is across southern Africa.

What the river adds is fish. Bream, the local name for tilapia, and catfish are caught from the Chobe and the Zambezi, fried, grilled or dried, and they appear on lodge menus as readily as in home kitchens. Seasonal foods include phane, the dried mophane caterpillars gathered in the surrounding woodland and eaten fried with onion and tomato, and wild fruits such as marula.

The lodges cook international food, often with some ambition, and dinner beside the river is part of what people come for. In town the eating is simpler: grills, takeaways and supermarket counters serving chips, rolls and stew to workers and to travellers stocking up for the park or the border. Drinks are bottled lager, Chibuku sorghum beer and home brews, with soft drinks and tea everywhere.