Journal

Botswana was never colonized in the way its neighbors were, and the story it offers a returning visitor is about what happened after independence.

Get the words for the country, the people and the language right, and Botswana will notice; get them wrong and it will notice that too.

All four of Botswana’s UNESCO listed traditions are on the urgent safeguarding list, which is the opposite of what that label usually means.

Botswana eats meat and grain, in that order, and its national dish is a method rather than a recipe: boiled slowly, then pounded.

Botswana calls the Makgadikgadi the largest salt pans in the world, and its nomination is for the archaeology as much as the emptiness.

A river that never reaches the sea, flooding a desert in the middle of the dry season, is the whole reason the Okavango exists.

Four thousand five hundred paintings in ten square kilometers of Kalahari, and the people who live beside them still treat it as a place of worship.

Zambia has three seasons rather than two, and the water that makes the falls spectacular is the same water that closes the roads.

Zambia is not a place to look for a ship that left, and the reconnection it offers is a different and less familiar one.

Zambia runs on greeting people properly, and a visitor who learns that one habit will be treated differently for the rest of the trip.

Zambia holds more than twenty traditional ceremonies a year, and the most famous of them has no date because it waits for the flood.

Nshima is not a side dish in Zambia, it is the meal, and everything else on the plate is named for its relationship to it.