Nata

Nata owes its existence to water and to routes. The Nata river, seasonal but reliable in a wet year, reaches Sua Pan here, and the grassland around its mouth made good grazing in a country where surface water is rare. Bakalanga and Batswana cattle-keeping families settled along it, and the pans behind the village were known long before as a source of salt and a hunting ground, crossed on the old wagon routes that ran north-west from the Tati gold fields towards Ngamiland and the Zambezi.

The modern village is a creature of the road. As tarred highways were pushed through northern Botswana in the later twentieth century, the point where the routes from Francistown, Maun and Kasane converged became the natural place to stop, refuel and change buses. Filling stations, shops and lodges followed, and Nata grew into a service village for a very large and thinly settled area.

Two later developments shaped it further. The soda-ash and salt works on the north-eastern side of Sua Pan, with its own planned town, brought industry and jobs to the pan in the 1990s, and a heavy-truck trade to the roads. Planned from 1988 by local communities and opened in 1993, the Nata Bird Sanctuary on the pan's north-eastern corner was one of Botswana's earliest community-run conservation projects, turning the floodwaters and their flamingos into a reason for travellers to stay the night rather than simply pass through.

Nata sits on a cultural boundary. It lies in the Central District among Bangwato villages, but Kalanga families from the north-east and Bakalanga, Babirwa and San communities from around the pans all live here, and Ikalanga is heard alongside Setswana and the English of the road. Traffic from three directions has made the village unusually mixed for its size, with Zimbabwean traders and travellers a constant presence.

Village life follows the familiar rural pattern: the kgotla for meetings and disputes, churches of several denominations, and weddings and funerals that fill a compound for days and draw relatives from Francistown, Gaborone and beyond. Cattle are the measure of a family's standing, and the calendar turns on the rains, the ploughing and the mophane harvest rather than on any festival.

The bird sanctuary has become part of local identity as well as local income: it was set up by the surrounding communities, who gave up grazing on the pan edge in exchange for a share in it, and the argument about how conservation, cattle and livelihoods fit together is an ongoing local conversation rather than a settled matter. Visitors are met with straightforward courtesy; greetings come first, and photographs of people should be asked for.

About 7,700 people live in Nata, making it a large village by the standards of this empty stretch of country. The day starts early, slows in the heat and picks up again as the light softens, when cattle, goats and donkeys drift back through the sand tracks between the compounds.

Work comes from the road and from livestock. Filling stations, shops, takeaways, lodges and campsites live off the traffic between Francistown, Maun and Kasane; the sanctuary and the tourism around it employ guides, cooks and cleaners; the soda-ash works on the pan draws workers from the whole area, and a few commute to Francistown. Most households also keep cattle and goats at the lands and cattle posts outside the village, and plant sorghum, maize and melons when the rains allow.

Services are those of a village rather than a town: a clinic, primary and secondary schools, boreholes and standpipes, mobile coverage that fades quickly beyond the settlement. Elephants moving along the Nata–Kasane road are a routine hazard and sometimes reach fields and water points. Drought, the price of cattle and the reliability of the borehole supply are the recurring worries, and serious shopping, banking and hospital care mean a trip to Francistown.

Everyday cooking here is the plain fare of rural Botswana: bogobe, a porridge of sorghum or maize meal, served with beef, goat or chicken stew, with morogo — gathered or cultivated greens — or with dikgobe, samp and beans simmered together. Seswaa, meat boiled long and pounded soft with salt, belongs to weddings, funerals and kgotla occasions rather than to daily meals.

Phane, the fat caterpillars of the mophane emperor moth, are collected in the surrounding woodland after the rains, gutted, boiled and dried, then fried with onion and tomato or eaten dry as a snack; the harvest brings cash as well as protein to village households, and sacks of them travel from here to the markets of Francistown. Madila, soured milk from the cattle posts, and biltong carry households through the dry months, and marula and baobab fruit are eaten and drunk in season.

The junction itself has its own food culture, shaped by drivers and bus passengers: grilled meat, fat cakes, roasted maize, chips and sweet tea sold quickly and eaten standing up. Bottle stores supply lager, Chibuku sorghum beer and home brews, while the lodges south of the village cook braais and international dishes for their guests.