D'kar

Seven cows and a jumbo jet tail: the painters of D'kar

In February 1997 a man from British Airways came to see a painter called Cg’ose Ntcox’o. She was in her forties, spoke Naro and could not read. He had a paper with him. She put a cross on it. A few months later her picture of animals among trees was on the tail of a Boeing 747, one of the fifteen “world image” tails the airline launched that June in place of the Union flag. Eight jumbos carried it.

What the cross on the paper bought

The fee was 12,000 pula. Half went to the Kuru Development Trust, which ran the studio, and half to her. Luke Harding, reporting for the Mail & Guardian in July 1998, found out where her share went: seven cows, a shack on the edge of the Kalahari, and the rest handed round her relatives. Her husband had tuberculosis and her daughter had no work.

She only understood what had been sold when the airline held a ceremony for the design. Her word for the aeroplane was “a big fly”. She took her complaint to the Botswana Guardian, and by Harding’s account the trust’s disciplinary committee called her in for it. She told him she might be illiterate but she was “not stupid”, and that she knew what her work was worth. The airline’s man in South Africa said she had got a fair deal.

Nobody can even agree what the animals are. Harding’s report said hyenas. Later descriptions of the livery say jackals, seven of them. The airline’s own title was simply Animals and Trees.

The design had a second moment of fame that October, when Margaret Thatcher was shown a model jumbo in the new colours, covered its tail and said “we fly the British flag, not these awful things”. The usual account has the model wearing the D’kar picture. She got her way in the end. In May 2001 a new chief executive, Rod Eddington, ordered the whole fleet back to the flag.

Ntcox’o’s work went on a Botswana postage stamp in 2004 and she was given a Presidential Certificate of Honour in 2011. She died of a stroke in 2013 and left next to nothing.

Three women and a house

Her only child died in 1999 and her husband in 2003. A neighbour took her in: Dada, the painter whose proper name was Coex’ae Qgam. Dada was born in 1934, had worked as a nanny and house servant across the border in Namibia, and learned her needlework there. In 1996 she told the old story of Qauqaua for an artists’ book printed at the Artists’ Press in Johannesburg. It has eleven colour plates, most running across two pages, each signed by the D’kar artist who made it. A biography by Ann Gollifer and Jenny Egner came out in 2011. The project sells it as I Don’t Know Why I Was Created.

Dada died in October 2008. Ntcox’o drifted between friends and relatives for a while, then another painter gave her a home for the rest of her life: Qgocgae Cao, known as Sara, born in 1931. Sara’s parents still lived by hunting and gathering, and she has recalled wearing skin clothes in the years when she became one of the first of her generation to earn a wage on the freehold farms around Ghanzi. The project still lists her among its artists.

So is Thamae Kaashe, who joined as a teenager in 1990 and is the one to look for if you prefer prints to canvases. His linocuts took first prize in Botswana’s national competitions in five of the ten years from 2013 to 2022.

Why the dancing keeps stopping

James Morris, an elder of the village, was one of the people who started the Kuru festival. They took it out of D’kar on purpose. The healing dance is a ritual and the noise from the village’s night spots was spoiling it, so it went to the Dqae Qare farm to the south.

Then the Kuru trust in D’kar and its sister body, the Letloa Trust, fell out over who controlled the event and who answered for the sponsors’ money. Debswana, the diamond company, withdrew a three-year sponsorship because of the row. The government magazine Kutlwano recorded Morris’s verdict in Setswana: educated people had ruined everything for them. The village also refused to see the festival moved to Ghanzi town. By August 2014 Mmegi was counting a third year without dancing.

It came back on 28 and 29 August 2015, by which time the tannery, the sewing room, the T-shirt printing and a cactus plot had all closed, leaving the studio and the game farm as the two Kuru ventures still running. In 2016 groups came from Kgalagadi, the Okavango, Namibia and South Africa. The 2017 line-up included, oddly, a Zulu troupe from South Africa. The twentieth-anniversary festival was held on 24 and 25 August 2018, with the healing dances on the Friday evening.

It has not recovered from the pause that followed. In 2022 the trust’s own coordinator said an administration crisis had paralysed it. In August 2026 Cynthia Soso, a University of Botswana graduate from D’kar, put on a Saturday evening of Naro culture in the village with a grant from the American organisation Cultural Survival. The district’s deputy council chairperson called it a stepping stone to getting the big festival back.

Animals, on canvas and off

Do not come to D’kar for game. This is cattle country and the wildlife is in the paintings. One of the project’s catalogues is titled Of Elands and Giraffes and Helicopters and Tea Cups, which is a fair list of what turns up on the canvases. Dqae Qare is stocked with game, giraffe and zebra among them, and one listing for the lodge promises “secretive predators” without naming one. I have found no sighting records for the farm worth repeating. For the real thing the Central Kalahari lies to the east.