Maun

The ground where Maun stands was Batawana country long before there was a town. The Batawana, a Tswana group who broke away from the Bangwato in the late eighteenth century, built a state around Lake Ngami and the Delta that drew in Bayei, Hambukushu, Basubiya and San communities as subjects, and moved their capital several times as water, grazing and disease dictated. David Livingstone passed through on his way to Lake Ngami in 1849, and hunters and traders followed the ivory and ostrich feathers.

In 1915 the Batawana moved their capital to the banks of the Thamalakane, and Maun has been their seat ever since. For most of the twentieth century it was a remote cattle and administrative village, cut off from the rest of the country by sand tracks and by the veterinary fences built to control foot-and-mouth disease, and shadowed by tsetse fly. Supplies came in slowly and travellers rarely.

Conservation and aviation made the modern town. The Batawana set aside the Moremi Game Reserve on their own land in 1963; safari operators, charter pilots and mechanics settled through the later twentieth century, and in the June to August high season the airport became the second-busiest in Africa for aircraft movements. The tarred road from Nata arrived in the 1990s and ended the isolation, and the Okavango Delta's inscription as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2014 confirmed the town's place as the gateway to it. Maun has grown quickly since, and now mixes a district capital, a cattle village and a tourism industry on the same sandy streets.

Maun is the most mixed town in Botswana. It is the Batawana capital, with the chief's kgotla at its heart, but Bayei, Hambukushu, Herero, Basubiya, Bakalanga and San families all live here, and Setswana is spoken alongside Seyei, Thimbukushu, Otjiherero and the English of the safari business. Herero women in long dresses and horn-shaped headcloths are a familiar sight in the market, and the town has a long-settled community of expatriate pilots, guides and lodge owners.

That mixture shows in how people work. Poling a mokoro, reading water and tracking animals are Bayei and Hambukushu skills turned into professions, and a good guide holds real standing in town. Basket weaving from mokola palm fibre, much of it made in the panhandle villages, is sold through Maun's craft shops and cooperatives, and carving and beadwork travel the same route.

Underneath the tourism, village manners hold: unhurried greetings, respect for elders, kgotla meetings that settle disputes, and funerals and weddings that occupy whole weekends and bring relatives from Gaborone and the villages. Cattle still measure family wealth, and conversations turn on the flood, grazing, the veterinary fences and the argument over elephants and hunting that runs through the whole district.

About 85,000 people live in Maun, one of the fastest-growing places in the country, and the town spreads over a very large area of sand, thornbush and riverine trees rather than rising into anything like a city centre. Cattle, donkeys and goats wander the roadsides between supermarkets, workshops and charter offices.

Tourism is the engine: lodges, camps, mobile safari operators, air charters, vehicle hire, mechanics, caterers and freight all work out of Maun, and the town fills with pilots and guides in the dry season and quietens in the rains, when many are laid off. Government employment — the district administration, the hospital and schools — is the other mainstay, and households keep cattle at posts outside town and fish or farm floodplain fields along the river.

Growth has outrun the infrastructure in places: unmade roads, water supply and housing are constant local issues, and so is the cost of living in a town where tourism sets prices. Wildlife is an everyday matter rather than an attraction, with hippos in the river, elephants raiding fields and crocodile warnings along the banks. The rise and fall of the flood is watched closely, because it decides the fishing, the grazing and the season ahead.

Maun eats in two registers. The everyday meal is the Botswana plate — bogobe, porridge of sorghum or maize meal, or rice and pap, with a relish of beef, goat or chicken stew, morogo greens, or dikgobe, samp and beans — sold from takeaways, market stalls and workplace canteens. Seswaa, meat boiled long and pounded soft with salt, belongs to weddings, funerals and kgotla occasions.

The Delta adds fish. Bream, the local name for tilapia, and catfish are caught in the channels and the Thamalakane, and come to the table grilled over coals, fried or dried for the lean months; dried fish is sold in the market alongside dried phane, the mophane caterpillars gathered after the rains, and beans, melons and wild fruits in season. Water-lily tubers and marula are gathered from the floodplain, and madila, soured milk, comes in from the cattle posts.

The second register is the safari kitchen: braais, salads, steaks, burgers, curries and cooked breakfasts served at the riverside lodges and bars where guides, pilots and travellers gather between trips, and the ambitious cooking of the camps out in the Delta. Drinks are lager, Chibuku sorghum beer and home brews, with coffee shops in the malls serving the town's office and airport trade.