Tsabong

The southern Kalahari was San country long before any town stood here, and its pans and dry riverbeds were used by hunting bands whose descendants still live in the district. Bakgalagadi herders moved into the sandveld from the east over centuries, digging wells and keeping cattle and goats where the grazing allowed, and the Molopo valley became the region's line of settlement because water could be reached beneath its sand.

Tsabong itself grew as an administrative post in the Bechuanaland Protectorate, chosen as the centre for a district of enormous size and very few people. Its hospital came to serve an outlying area of scattered villages and cattle posts hundreds of kilometres across, and near the town lies the Tshabong kimberlite field, one of the largest diamond-bearing kimberlite fields in the world.

After independence in 1966 the town gained the apparatus of a district capital — offices, a hospital, secondary schools, a police headquarters — and boreholes made permanent settlement possible over a wider area. Paving the road to Kanye and Gaborone ended the worst of its isolation, and the creation of the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park with South Africa in 2000 gave the district a slow but growing tourist trade based on the desert to its north and west.

Tsabong is a quiet, conservative town where Setswana and Shekgalagadi are heard together and Afrikaans is common near the border. Bakgalagadi identity is strong in the surrounding villages, San communities live in and around several of them, and families on both sides of the Molopo are related to one another, with the border a recent administrative line across long-standing ties.

Livestock is the measure of most things. Cattle, goats and donkeys are wealth, inheritance and the reason for much of the district's movement, and questions about rain and grazing open most conversations. The kgotla still hears village disputes, funerals draw whole communities for days, and church attendance is high. Winter nights are famously cold here — the lowest temperature ever recorded in Botswana was measured at Tsabong — and life gathers round fires when they come.

Craft here is practical: leatherwork, karosses, ostrich-eggshell beads and grass work made largely by women's groups and sold from homes and cooperatives. Visitors are few enough to be noticed, and a greeting and a short conversation before any request are expected — arriving with a camera in hand and no introduction is the quickest way to be refused. Photographs of people and homesteads should always be asked for.

About 9,000 people lived in Tsabong at the 2011 census, making it the largest place in a district that covers a vast, thinly peopled stretch of the Kalahari. Government is the biggest employer — the district administration, hospital, schools, police and veterinary services — with shops, transport and small businesses around it, and livestock farming supporting most rural households.

The day starts before the heat, with school runs, queues at the offices and the early bus out to Gaborone, slows through the middle hours, and picks up again in the late afternoon when people come out to the shops and the football pitch. Households move between town plots and cattle posts in the dunes, and water — from boreholes, tankered to some villages in bad years — is the constant preoccupation.

Drought is the recurring crisis. Poor rains thin the herds and push families onto government drought-relief work, and foot-and-mouth restrictions can shut the beef trade for months at a time. Unemployment is high, especially for young people, and many leave for Gaborone or the mines. What has changed the town most in recent decades is the paved road and mobile coverage; tourism to the Kgalagadi parks adds a modest but growing number of jobs as guides, campsite staff and drivers.

Food in the southern Kalahari comes from the herd. Goat and beef are stewed or grilled, offal is used carefully, and biltong hangs drying in many kitchens. Seswaa, salted meat boiled for hours and pounded into shreds, is served at weddings, funerals and public holidays with bogobe, the stiff porridge of sorghum or maize that accompanies nearly every meal, and with morogo, the gathered or garden greens cooked down with tomato and onion.

Milk matters in a herding district: madila, soured and thickened milk, is eaten with porridge, and mageu, a lightly fermented maize drink, is drunk cold through the hot months. The desert adds its own foods when the rains are good — the tsamma melon, valued as much for the water it holds as for its flesh, morama beans roasted for their kernels, wild cucumbers, berries and the truffle-like fungi that push through the sand after heavy storms.

In town, the food is straightforward: magwinya, the fried dough balls sold in the morning, takeaway plates of chicken or beef with pap, rice and coleslaw, bread and maize meal from the supermarkets, and braai over coals at weekends. Chibuku sorghum beer in cartons, home-brewed bojalwa and South African lagers are the usual drinks, and Afrikaans-speaking families near the border bring their own habits of potjiekos and rusks.