Mating and Botswana

Today I hoped to meet up with a friend of a friend, someone running a school and/or a daycare in Botswana, but the tour operator told me, in no uncertain terms, that it wasn't a possibility. I think the words "remote bushcamp" might have reappeared. With any luck, though, I might have moved my schedule a little to make things work. I hope.

But Botswana... Another selling point for the trip. A couple of years ago, I received a book set here. The Christmas gift made me proud as the book required a companion dictionary (and not a pocket-sized one or anything abridge but rather something akin to the OED). My friend must have thought I was smart enough for the book.

Of course, she might have been wrong.

I found myself looking up word after word and stumbling to reach a rhythm in its pages. The descriptions of Botswana and Victoria Falls both made me want to drop anything and fly halfway around the world. Now I have.

"Set in Botswana in the days before the end of apartheid, Norman Rush's novel is, essentially, a comedy of manners played out in Austen's approved milieu: a country village. Granted, the village in question, Tsau, is a utopian society created by the great American anthropologist Nelson Denoon, and run largely by and for disenfranchised and abused African women. Still, the issue that interests Rush (and the one that fueled Austen's novels) is the age-old question of who mates with whom, and why? The unnamed narrator is a 32-year-old postgraduate student in anthropology whose dissertation has just gone south on her. Drifting around the edges of the expatriate community in Gaborone, the capital of Botswana, she first meets Denoon:

"He was smiling at Kgosetlemang--the event was to be considered over with, clearly--and I could tell that his gingivae were as good as mine; which is saying a lot. I attend to my gums. People in the bush don't always attend to their oral hygiene, not to mention other niceties. There was no sign of that here. I of course am fanatical about my gums because my idea of what the movie I Wake Up Screaming is about is a woman who has to keep dating to find her soulmate and she's had to get dentures. I have very long-range anxieties.

"Entranced by this potential soulmate, our heroine strikes out into the Kalahari Desert with a couple of donkeys and follows him to his utopia where sexual attraction, regional politics, and social experimentation make for very strange bedfellows, indeed."

It might have been the book that swayed me toward this trip versus Kenya and Tanzania, away from the cradle of civilization, to this nation that remained 88 percent undeveloped.

It might have swayed me toward a better dictionary, as well.


Written on December 15 and autoposted to correlate with the trip.

Tag: South Africa Namibia Vacation Travel