by Jack Templeton, of the University of Vermont
On this week’s installment of Round River in Botswana, we got a taste of Mababe traditional culture, more predator sightings, and people melting in more ways than one. On Sunday the 28th of October we were invited to the nearby village of Mababe to view a traditional cultural dance performance put on by some of the locals in the village.
The dance was held in a small compound within Mababe that was built for the purpose of upholding the traditional cultural practices of the area. The compound was a fenced area consisting of about four old looking huts that were constructed in the way that they would have been thousands of years ago by building the walls out of reeds and wooden posts and the roof out of grass. Before the dance begun, we observed one of the village elders showing us how the people of ancient Botswana would use a bellows to keep a fire going hot enough to forge metal. This method involved a contraption that had two chambers with each chamber having a tube coming out of it pointed towards the existing fire. The chambers also had cloth on top of them that was attached to sticks. The man would move up and down in order to pump air into the tubes pointed at the fire.
After this we took our seats and the dance performance began with a choir of traditionally clad people singing in front of a fire. After some time, the performance evolved into more of a dance show. People circled the fire and were accompanied by a chant from the chorus behind them. They soon invited us up to the fire to join them in circling the fire in a stomp-oriented dance. This experience was a great way to connect with the community and learn what Botswana would have looked and felt like a long time ago.
Mababe residents perform an ostrich dance. Photo by Ian Nelson
Residents of Mababe perform a traditional stomping dance. Photo by Ian Nelson
After the show we thanked them and rode back to camp in the dark. It was exciting to ride in the dark because there is a higher chance of seeing predatory animals at night. Sure enough, about mid-way through our trip back to camp, we spotted a particularly large spotted hyena running along the right side of the road. I noticed it by identifying the shine of its green reflective eyes before seeing the rest of its muscular, spotted body running towards us.
Close spotted hyena encounter. Very close and quite obviously in our camp. Photo by Ian Nelson
The next day the comical trio of Ian Nadel, Lauren, and myself got up at dawn to conduct a bird point count with Samara as our driver. The bird point counts involve driving a pre-established route and stopping every 200 meters to record all the bird species we observe for five minutes. The most exciting part of this drive though was in the first five minutes on the way to the route, when we spotted a female leopard. The leopard was about 100 meters to the left of the car trotting further into the bush. As rare as leopards are, I was not surprised to see one because of how strangely lucky our group has been with predator sightings. This was the fourth leopard I had seen and for some of us it was the sixth.
The rest of the week consisted of us students becoming more and more stressed as Samara stacked up the midterm assignments on the camp whiteboard. We responded to this stress by spending the next few days scribbling down assignments as the wind whipped through the paper in our binders. The middle of the week was now upon us and it was Wednesday the 31st. Halloween was upon us and the monotony of the 110° F work days were broken with an appropriately spooky event. On Halloween night, as we munched on Skittles and M&M’s, a hyena crossed directly in front of Hannah Thorne as she took the trash to the trash cage in our camp. After slowly backing away, she alerted the rest of the group, and we watched the hyena as it fed on food scraps beside the trash cage at about fifteen feet away. The hyena seemed docile and unfazed as it would look up at us occasionally before returning to its meal. The night ended with us watching the movie “I, Tonya” on the projector as the hyena ate nearby and the giant sun spiders scrambled about on the projector screen.
Thanks for reading and wish us all luck as we finally conclude midterm meltdown week. Stay tuned to read next week’s installment of our sweltering adventures, hopefully containing more encounters with the predatory beasts of the Delta.