Francistown

The Dakota that burned on Francistown's airstrip in 1963

Early on 29 August 1963 a Douglas Dakota belonging to East African Airways was destroyed by fire on the ground at Francistown’s airfield. The day before, two men dressed as priests had flown in from Swaziland. They were Arthur Goldreich and Harold Wolpe, who had bribed a young warder and walked out of Marshall Square police station in Johannesburg on 11 August. One of the biggest manhunts South Africa had seen was still going on behind them. The ANC had chartered the Dakota to take them on to Dar es Salaam.

Jeff Ramsay, who went through the colonial files in the Botswana National Archives, puts the bombing down to “unknown agents”. Hage Geingob, SWAPO’s assistant representative in Botswana at the time and much later president of Namibia, was more definite. The usual account of his exile has him booked on an ANC charter out of Francistown that South African agents blew up the evening before it was due to leave, which fits this aircraft. Goldreich and Wolpe got away in a smaller plane on 8 September and landed in Tanzania to a crowd of reporters.

Machel’s three months of waiting

The Dakota was not the first. Ramsay traced one that left Francistown on 21 June 1963 with a passenger list of “26 South African students”. Two of them were Mozambicans, and one of those was Samora Machel, a 29-year-old hospital nurse who twelve years later was president of his country. Joe Slovo and JB Marks of the ANC were on board too. They reached Dar es Salaam, by way of Blantyre, on 23 June.

Machel had not meant to stop in Bechuanaland at all. He and Matias Mboa were riding the Rhodesia Railways train north with papers that made them Malawian migrant workers going home, and at Plumtree it came out that they spoke neither English nor Chichewa. A member of the Bechuanaland People’s Party saw what was happening and talked them into coming back down the line with him. Around 18 March they asked the District Commissioner in Francistown for asylum and got permits good for two weeks. The party then sent them south to Lobatse, where a family called Kgaboesele put them up for the best part of three months. Officials wanted the Mozambicans declared prohibited immigrants and put out. The Resident Commissioner, Peter Fawcus, said no. Francistown’s own administration was no friendlier: a telegram of 4 June from the travel agent in Dar es Salaam asks about landing a Dakota at Serowe instead, “as Francistown uncooperative”.

The August bomb ended the airline charters and the traffic went by road. Peter Mackay, a journalist who had left Rhodesia for Lusaka, ran what became known as the Freedom Road, carrying refugees in his Land Rover from Francistown to Zambia. In 1965 he arranged the transport for 19 Mozambicans, three of them children, who left Francistown for the river crossing at Kazungula. Among them were Josina Muthemba, who married Machel four years later, and Armando Guebuza, Mozambique’s president from 2005. Mackay’s memoir, We Have Tomorrow, covers those years.

The White House in Blue Town

Refugees waiting for a lift slept in a building in Blue Town, beside the airport, that everyone called the White House. Priscilla Kaoyao, who lived close by, remembers a hall partitioned into rooms that could take more than fifty people, most of them Namibians. Ian Khama, speaking at the city’s 120th birthday in 2017, said the first White House grew too small and that its replacement was bombed in July 1964. Thabo Mbeki, Sam Nujoma, Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe were on his list of people who came through. Namibia’s first four presidents are all said to have been sheltered on that one Blue Town plot, where a woman of Namibian origin called Mary Kaoyao took them in.

The council pulled the hall down around the time of Namibian independence. The site is now Plot 7440, with Priscilla Kaoyao’s house on part of it. The bombs did not stop in the 1960s. Soul Moremi, who lived through those years in Francistown, told the Daily News in 2024 about a Blue Town man called Thotologolo Skoti whose house was bombed for taking in Zimbabweans in the Ian Smith years, and who carried on doing it. Moremi was also in the Mophane Club under Nyangabgwe hill in 1982 when a bomb went off while a band from Gaborone was on stage. He was wounded in the thigh.

J.M. Coetzee starts his novel Summertime here, in a way. The first page is a notebook entry dated 22 August 1972 about a newspaper report from Francistown: a white American car pulling up in the middle of the night at a house where South African refugees are living, and afterwards a father and son in Cape Town not quite discussing who sent it.

A haunted cottage and a typewriter

Bessie Head is always linked to Serowe, but her first novel was written in Francistown. She came up by train from Palapye in 1966 with her small son Howard after losing her job, because this was where the refugees were and she had decided she would have to become one officially. She had no passport. The two of them lived in a two-roomed cottage that people said was haunted. An advance from Simon and Schuster arrived in December 1966, she had a typewriter at last, and When Rain Clouds Gather was finished in just under a year.

It was not a happy stay. She applied to several countries for resettlement and none would have her. Once the book was done the religious visions she had had before came back, and Howard was having trouble at school for being “Coloured”. They went back to Serowe in January 1969.

Otters at Shashe, water under the Tati

Nobody comes to Francistown for animals. Shashe Dam is the nearest big water, and otters, Nile monitors and turtles are recorded on the reservoir along with the water birds. So is litter at the waterline. The Tati itself looks dead for most of the year, but the water is still there a little way down. Sand miners have been digging the bed out, and that has lowered the water table.