Shakawe

The panhandle has been lived in for far longer than most of Botswana. San communities have been in this corner of the Kalahari for many thousands of years, as the painted hills at Tsodilo to the south-east record, and river-dwelling farming peoples settled along the Okavango well over a thousand years ago, fishing, growing millet and sorghum on the floodplain and keeping small stock. Shakawe grew as one of the villages where the deep channel, firm ground and fields came together.

The Hambukushu are the people most associated with the upper panhandle. They came south from the Zambezi and Kwando region over several centuries, bringing iron working, river farming and a reputation as rainmakers, and they settled the riverbank villages under their own leaders while acknowledging the Batawana state centred far to the south around Lake Ngami. Trade in ivory, hides, fish and grain tied the river villages to the wider region long before colonial administration reached them.

In the twentieth century the village remained remote, hemmed by sand roads, the tsetse fly and veterinary fences. A further wave of Hambukushu arrived from Angola from the late 1960s as war crossed the border, and were settled in the panhandle and at Etsha. Tarring the road from Maun, the growth of the fishing and safari trade, Tsodilo's World Heritage listing in 2001 and the bridge over the Okavango at Mohembo have steadily reduced the isolation, and Shakawe is now the service centre for the whole upper panhandle.

Shakawe's culture is river culture. The Hambukushu form the majority, with Thimbukushu spoken at home, Setswana as the national language and English in offices and schools, alongside Bayei, Herero, San and Tswana families and Namibians with kin on the far bank. Fishing, poling a dugout and reading the flood are ordinary skills here rather than tourist attractions, and knowledge of the channels is something older people hold and pass on.

Craft is the best-known cultural export. Women across the panhandle weave tightly coiled baskets from the fibre of the mokola palm, dyed with bark and roots into patterns with their own names, and sell them through village cooperatives that reach shops in Maun and beyond. Wood carving, fish traps and reed work belong to the same tradition of using what the river provides.

Community life runs through the kgotla, where matters are discussed until a decision is reached, and through the churches, which draw large congregations on Sunday. Rain and the flood carry particular weight in local belief and conversation: the Hambukushu have a long association with rainmaking, and the Tsodilo Hills to the south-east are treated as a place of spiritual significance rather than a viewpoint. Visitors are expected to behave accordingly.

About 7,000 people live in Shakawe, which makes it one of the larger villages of the north-west and the place where the surrounding settlements come for anything official. Homesteads of brick and thatch spread through the bush on sand tracks, with cattle, goats and donkeys wandering between them, and the tarred road carries the shops, the filling station, the bank, the clinic, the schools and the government offices.

People live from a mixture of things: fishing the panhandle, growing maize, sorghum and millet on floodplain fields, keeping livestock, weaving baskets, and paid work in government, schools, the border post and the camps and lodges along the river. Money from relatives working in Maun, Gaborone or South Africa matters too. Unemployment is high, as it is across rural Botswana, and young people often leave for the towns.

The day begins early, before the heat, and slows through the middle hours. Water levels, crop damage by elephants and hippos, school results and the state of the sand roads are constant subjects. Electricity, mobile coverage and the tarred road have all reached the village, but distance still shapes everything: Maun is most of a day away, and serious medical cases travel far.

Food here is Botswana's, with the river added. Bogobe, a porridge of sorghum or maize, is the base of most meals, 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 cooked for weddings, funerals and kgotla occasions, and grilled meat over coals is the social meal.

Fish is what distinguishes panhandle cooking. Bream, the local name for tilapia, and catfish are taken by line, net and trap from the channels, then fried, grilled or split and dried in the sun so they keep through the year. Tigerfish, the prize of visiting anglers, are largely caught and released. The floodplain also yields water-lily tubers and seeds, and wild fruits including marula and monkey orange are gathered in season.

Phane, the dried mophane caterpillars, are collected in the surrounding woodland and fried with onion and tomato or eaten as a snack. Millet and sorghum are ground at home or at small mills. Drinks are tea, bottled lager, Chibuku sorghum beer and home brews, and the riverside camps cook a more international menu for their guests, usually with fish from the same water.