By Lauren Ulrich from Indiana University
My feet sink into the mud as Tshukudu leads through the reeds. We follow behind him, trampling down a path through the reeds.
“Do not step past here,” Tshukudu warns, pointing to where the reeds fade into muddy brown water. Crocodiles could be waiting just under the surface he says with a grin.
Tshukudu, whose name means rhino in Setswana, passes out spools of line. I bait my hook, and the smell of dirt and worms reminds me of home.
I learned to fish in a different river when I was about as tall as the reeds now scratching at my thighs. My dad, my first fishing teacher, always used to put worms on my hook for me. That river was a clear, rock-bottom stream in the Missouri Ozarks over 8,000 miles away from the Okavango Delta of Botswana. It didn’t have crocodiles or hippos, but it did have worms.
Lines start plopping onto the surface and others fling backward into the reeds as Tshukudu teaches us Americans to hand line fish. Upstream, the rest of our fishing guides have already filled up a reed strung through the gills of tilapia. They fish most days after work at Khwai village’s community trust campground, Mogotlho Camp.
I look up from my line and see an elephant on the opposite bank. Its reflection ripples over the water with the rosy pinks of sunset. “This is the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen,” I say to no one in particular, wide-eyed at the elephant-river-sunset-scene.
I might have recited a poem if not for the sensation of leeches nibbling at my legs a second later. The smell of Vaseline (rubbed all over my body to keep leeches from latching on) blocks out my nostalgia.
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The parents who taught me to fish loved sending me to study abroad in Botswana. They sent me down to the creek to grow up with crawdads and copperheads, so crocodiles were a natural progression. “Our daughter’s going to Africa!” they’d say to anyone who’d listen at the St. Louis, MO airport. I was their little fish swimming out to a big pond — a very big, very scary pond full of lions.
But I didn’t feel like a very strong fish our first night camping in Khwai.
I remember the smell of fish filling up my nostrils when we pulled up to camp. One of our escort guides, Chris, had brought back a reed full of fish for dinner. I remember the metallic scraping sound as I scaled one with a dull kitchen knife. Chris didn’t say much, just scaled a dozen in the time it took me to scale one. Then cut all their guts out.
I didn’t have the guts to cut one up myself. My dad always used to clean my fish for me. We fished from my grandpa’s red canoe, sure, but my sense of place didn’t extend to feeding myself. I reeled in sunfish, bass, and bluegill, but didn’t help clean them when we got home.
I got to know Chris more one night around the fire. He told me about his tribe, the Bugakhwe or “River Basarwa” tribe who now live along the Khwai river of the Okavango Delta. Chris said they used to live farther north, until the day the government came.
His mother told him the story. They burned their huts and people fled, she told him. Their land became Moremi Game Reserve — a protected area right across the river from where we’d been fishing. Bugakhwe people aren’t allowed there anymore.
I thought about my river back home. Did someone fish in that river long, long before me? Did they get moved off their land, too? If I didn’t know how to clean a fish, I certainly didn’t know the names of the Indigenous tribes of the Missouri Ozarks.
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At the muddy brown river, the sun sets a little deeper into the reeds. Grasshoppers start chirping. “Xhomxhaxhane,” I whisper. Our campground host, Mmapula, taught me how to say grasshopper in Bugakhwe.
I see a water lily — adii in Bugakhwe — by my feet. Mmapula gave me a water lily necklace earlier. She told me women in her tribe wear water lilies necklaces when they get engaged and float down the river in a wooden mokoro canoe.
I look out at the elephant-river-sunset-scene and imagine myself in an adii necklace floating down a river lined with hippos. Maybe one day I’ll get engaged in my grandpa’s red canoe.
Mmapula, Chris, and the rest of our hosts gave me a gift in Khwai. They shared with me the story of a people and a river. By doing so, they taught me to think of my own river story in a new way. I went all the way to Botswana to learn about people and the environment, but I never thought to learn the story of the river I grew up in.
When I get home, I’ll ask my dad to teach me how to clean a fish. I’ll ask him to take me on walks around our property. I’ll listen when he tells me about the Sycamore trees growing on the banks of the creeks.
When I get home, I’ll learn about the Otoe-Missouria, Osage, Quapaw, and more tribes who are the rightful stewards of the land I always used to view as my own.
I’ll be a little fish in a little pond. Maybe I didn’t need a bigger one after all.