June 20, 2008
If guests at Camp Okavango look up from their candlelit dinners, they will see a mighty remnant from the storied past of the Okavango Delta. Above them, hanging from the rafters of a thatched roof, is a 5-meter-long, mahogany-colored mokoro – the traditional means of transportation for the river bushmen of Botswana.
The man who worked day-in, day-out for a month nearly 30 years ago carving the canoe from a sycamore fig tree ‑- the man who has poled that mokoro through the narrow, papyrus-lined channels of the Okavango Delta -- is no doubt sitting nearby. He is John Odumetse Kata, the keen-eyed veteran guide at this camp for 28 years and a river bushman who remembers what the delta was like long before his kinsmen and women had ever seen a white face, let alone a tourist.
John Kata’s childhood was a time when clans of the ethnic Bayeyi tribe claimed islands temporarily as their own for means of survival. Constructing reed huts topped by roofs of what was known as red lechwe grass, they set up makeshift villages wherever they found plentiful game and a big tree for shade.
John Kata told me in a conversation translated from Setswana by his nephew, Camp Okavango Resident Manager M.C. Odumetse, about the history of this region where he now leads guests at a brisk pace on morning game walks and guides their boats and mokoros past the reeds and papyrus. His eyes, perpetually lit as if by sunlight within, can scan the horizon and detect the faintest movement of animals and birds. His gift derives from a singular heritage, a way of life he embodies as though he were a faithful firekeeper with a single ember to tend.
His first memories are of learning to hunt with snares and traps, to make a net for fishing, to carve a mokoro – as he says: “how to survive.” The best guess – only speculation by government census takers --is that John Kata was born in 1944 on what is now the famous Chief’s Island but called by the river bushmen “Sazeta” or “Tsobaoro” – big ebony. Perhaps at 10 years of age, perhaps 13, he carved his first mokoro under the tutelage of his father.
Each clan in the region numbered from about 50 to 80 people, he said. They lived in villages governed by “a headman,” each of whom John Kata said ruled an area “like a hippo.” For those unfamiliar with Botswana, that means with a fierce sense of territorial preservation. As the hunter-gatherer people moved from island to island to set up their homes, they needed to ask permission of areas’ headmen to secure passage.
“You will never ever pass through somebody’s place without consulting the headman,” he said.
And so when food became scarce, men would set out in mokoros to scout for the next place to move the clan. Danger was a given. From an early age, the river bushmen knew to stay clear of crocodiles, lions and hippos.
Their mokoros were made from the wood of African Ebony, Sausage or Marula trees and from the labor of communal hands. A single man would take 1 to 2 months to carve a mokoro, while teamwork – valued and stressed at fireside storytelling for their children’s lessons – could produce a mokoro in three weeks.
Once the scouts found a place teeming with herds of kudu, impalas, wildebeest or tsessebe, they would return to their families to start the trek. First, the mokoros would haul basics: the pots, cups and blankets for a family. Then the families would come: a mother poling at the front tip of the mokoro, a father at the back, with the children in between. On the way to their new land, they would fish for tilapia and nibble on dried catfish that had been smoked with palm leaves.
If someone became ill, a traditional doctor was always at hand. He was a member of the clan, one ready with a plant remedy for even the most poisonous of snake venoms. For some diseases, the traditional doctor would enlist the clan to sing and dance around the fires as an entreaty to the heavens for healing.
Did it work?
John Kata told me it did.
Eventually his clan’s wanderings took its members to what is now called Buffalo Island and even later to an island known as Mojei. Today it is these islands where John Kata walks with Camp Okavango’s guests. On Mojei there are scant signs of the village that was – the clearing, the shade tree. Occasionally a few remnants turn up, such as a metal cup or bits of rubber used for fishing line. It can strike one as sad, the absence of communal life gone from these islands, but John Kata said the clans of the river bushmen made their choice.
After diamonds were discovered in Botswana in 1967, the government promised to use royalties to build schools and health clinics. Out of this development effort came the government’s offer to relocate the clans to Maun, the gateway bustling village for the Okavango Delta. John Kata said the elderly people of his clan had no idea what a school was, but the headman had gone by mokoro to Maun and understood. He persuaded his clan to make the move, John Kata said, sometime in the mid-to-late 1970s. The fact that the clan moved meant that John Kata’s sister gave birth to M.C. Odumetse, Camp Okavango’s manager, in Maun in 1977. M.C. got an education. All of John Kata’s five children went to school as well.
John Kata appreciates the opportunity to show guests on holiday from their fast-paced lives his beloved Buffalo and Mojei islands. 
“This is the place of memories,” he said.
It is a beautiful place where “life was very simple and very basic…Maybe they can take that back with them.”
Many thanks to Maria Henson
Volunteer, Desert & Delta Safaris
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