Seronga

The northern side of the delta has one of the longest records of settlement in Botswana. San communities hunted and gathered along these floodplains for thousands of years, and river peoples moved in later, drawn by year-round water, fish and grazing on ground that the Kalahari otherwise denies. Seronga grew where firm land meets the head of the panhandle, at the point where the single channel begins to break up, which made it both a crossing place and a natural harbour for dugouts.

The Bayei are the community most associated with the delta's waterways. They came south from the Zambezi region and are credited with bringing the mokoro, the dugout canoe poled through shallow channels, into the Okavango, along with fish traps and floodplain farming; the Hambukushu of the panhandle are their northern neighbours, and both were drawn into the Batawana state centred on Lake Ngami from the late eighteenth century. Colonial administration touched this bank lightly: with no bridge and no tarred road, it stayed at the far edge of the Bechuanaland Protectorate.

The modern history is one of slowly easing isolation. Veterinary fences, tsetse-fly control and the ferry at Mohembo shaped movement for decades; the Okavango Delta's listing as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2014 raised its profile; and community tourism gave the village a new source of income, with local polers organising trips into the delta rather than working only for outside operators. A bridge over the river at Mohembo has since replaced the ferry.

Seronga is a delta village, and its culture is built on water. The Bayei tradition of poling a mokoro, reading channels, setting fish traps and farming the floodplain runs through daily life, alongside Hambukushu and San families and a Tswana administrative layer. Several languages are in use — Setswana as the national language, English in offices and schools, Thimbukushu and the Bayei language at home — and most people move between them.

Community organisation matters here more than in most places. The kgotla remains where matters are discussed and settled, and mokoro trips into the delta are arranged collectively by local polers, men and women from the village who take visitors out and share the income. That arrangement has made guiding, poling and knowledge of animals and channels a respected form of work, and it shapes how the village deals with outsiders: trips are arranged collectively rather than touted.

Churches draw large congregations, and funerals and weddings pull families back from Maun and Gaborone. Craft follows the river as well, with palm-fibre baskets, mats, fish traps and carved paddles made in the villages along this bank. Wildlife is part of the social fabric rather than a spectacle: elephants in the fields and hippos in the channels are a standing subject of conversation and of complaint.

About 2,800 people live in Seronga village, and some 3,300 with the settlements around it, in homesteads of brick, mud and thatch spread under palms and mopane along sand tracks. The village has a clinic, schools, a police presence and small shops, and serves as a minor centre for the scatter of settlements along the delta's northern edge, most of which are smaller still. Supplies arrive across the river or over long sand roads, so prices are higher and choice narrower than in the panhandle towns.

People live from fishing, floodplain fields of maize, sorghum and millet, cattle and goats, basket weaving, government jobs and tourism. Mokoro trips, camps and guiding bring in money that is unusual in a village of this size, and remittances from relatives in Maun and further afield make up much of the rest. Work is seasonal: the dry months bring visitors, the rains bring farming and quiet.

The rhythm follows the heat and the water. Boats and polers leave early, the middle of the day is still, and activity picks up again in the late afternoon. Local concerns are constant and practical: the state of the roads and the crossing, elephants raiding fields, the flood's height, access to health care at a distance, and how much of the tourism income stays in the community.

Everyday meals are Botswana's, adapted to the river. Bogobe, a porridge of sorghum, millet or maize, is the base, eaten with a relish of beef, goat or chicken, morogo (cooked wild greens), or beans and samp. Seswaa — meat boiled long and pounded with salt — is made for weddings, funerals and kgotla occasions, and meat grilled over coals is the shared, sociable meal.

Fish carries the rest of the diet. Bream, the local name for tilapia, and catfish are caught by line, net and trap in the channels and lagoons, then fried, grilled or split and dried in the sun so they last into the following season. Water-lily tubers and seeds are gathered from the floodplain, and wild fruits such as marula, monkey orange and palm fruit are eaten in season, some also fermented.

Phane, the dried mophane caterpillars, are collected in the woodland and fried with onion and tomato or eaten dry as a snack. Maize and sorghum are pounded at home or milled in the village. Tea, bottled lager, Chibuku sorghum beer and home brews are the usual drinks, and food on a mokoro trip is simple camp cooking, often with fish from the water being crossed.