Ghanzi

Death metal cowboys, a banished king and a kidnap on the Lobatse road

In August 2016 a band from Ghanzi played Wacken Open Air in northern Germany, one of the biggest heavy metal festivals in the world. They went on in leather jackets and trousers, cowboy boots and hats. They were Overthrust, and they come from a town where the main business is beef.

Leather and Stetsons in cattle country

Overthrust started in Ghanzi in late 2008. The frontman, Tshomarelo Mosaka, plays bass, growls the vocals and goes by Vulture Thrust. He was born in Rakops, came to Ghanzi in 2007 and was a policeman for about ten years, which he says is where the songs about death and brutality come from.

Botswana’s metal fans call themselves MaRock, and the uniform has two parents. One is Lemmy and the cover of Motörhead’s Ace of Spades. The other is the cattle post. A German metal magazine reported in 2016 that most of the fans work in farming and see the leather as work clothes taken a step further. Mosaka goes back another generation, to forefathers who herded cattle on horseback and made their riding gear, hats and shoes from cowhide.

Every May since 2010 the band has put on Winter Metal Mania in town. It has no sponsors, by the band’s account. In 2015 twelve bands played, and what the festival raises goes to children in and around Ghanzi as food, clothes and toiletries, passed on through the district’s social development office. In 2014 religious groups petitioned to have the band and its shows banned for playing satanic music. That is Mosaka’s telling, and he says the government turned them down. If you are passing in May, ask at your lodge whether the festival is on that weekend.

The king the British parked here

Colonial Bechuanaland used Ghanzi as a place to put people it wanted out of the way. In June 1931 the Resident Commissioner, Charles Rey, called Sebele II, king of the Bakwena, to Mafeking for what was said to be a meeting about water, and told him there that he was banished. There was no trial. A train took Sebele round to Gobabis in South West Africa, where a crowd turned out to cheer him, and he was driven the rest of the way.

It did not work as planned. The historian Jeff Ramsay, who has written most about the affair, records that Sebele became so well liked in Ghanzi that the white residents grew nervous of him. Back home many Bakwena stayed away from the meetings of the brother installed in his place, Kgari, and would not pay tax. In 1933 a petition for Sebele’s return carried 1,407 names. A son, Moruakgomo, was born in Ghanzi during the exile. In 1938 Sebele offered to abdicate formally if he could go home, and Kgari turned that down. Sebele died on 2 October 1939. Only his body went back to Molepolole, where thousands came to the funeral.

Three policemen and an unmarked truck

In July 1963 the security police came to Rehoboth in South West Africa to arrest the town’s doctor, Kenneth Abrahams, who was 26. So many people gathered at his house that they backed off. In August he left anyway, walking over the border into Bechuanaland with Andreas Shipanga, Paul Smit and Hermanus Beukes, a shoemaker who was among the first Namibians to petition the UN against South African rule. They were taken to Ghanzi and given residence permits. Then, on the road towards Lobatse and still inside Bechuanaland, three South African policemen in plain clothes stopped them, held a gun to Abrahams’s head, loaded them into an unmarked truck and drove them back to the cells at Gobabis.

Kidnapping people out of a British protectorate caused a row well beyond the Kalahari. Abrahams was flown to Cape Town on a sabotage charge. British officials brought a habeas corpus case in the South African Supreme Court, and South Africa sent the four back. Abrahams went on to Dar es Salaam and a seat on SWAPO’s central committee. Beukes had meant to carry on to New York and the UN. He went home to Rehoboth instead.

Whose water it was

The ivory hunter Hendrik van Zyl, who turns up in every history of the town, controlled the wells. When the first Thirstland trekkers asked to use them in 1875 he refused before he gave in. The Afrikaans historian Nicol Stassen records a far bigger party in 1893: 63 families with 66 wagons under Commandant J.M. Lombard came by way of Lake Ngami and were joined at Ghanzi by another 28 wagons that had crossed the south through Lehututu and Kang. About 70 families went on to Angola and the rest to South West Africa. Ghanzi families were still following a generation later: nine left in October 1921 and reached Sacanjimba in the Angolan highlands the next year.

A Ghanzi farmer of a later generation, Martinus Drotsky, was the first European to be shown the Gcwihaba caves, in 1932. They are far to the north, hard against the Namibian border, and the main cavern has carried his name since. There is an old story, never proved, that van Zyl hid a fortune in there.

The cheetahs are on the farms

Botswana has about 1,700 cheetahs, one of the largest populations anywhere, and Cheetah Conservation Botswana says more than 70% of them live outside protected areas. The western farmlands are where the clash with farmers is worst, which is why the project keeps a camp and a demonstration farm at Ghanzi. Do not plan on seeing one from the road. The researchers themselves find them with camera traps, collars and San trackers reading spoor.

The project’s diet studies put livestock at under 6% of what these farmland cheetahs eat. In May 2012 four cats carried collar cameras and were filmed hunting kudu. Moving “problem” cheetahs somewhere else mostly fails: only 18% were alive a year later, and some walked back. So the project places guard dogs with farmers instead, more than 130 since 2013. Its own study found the dogs cut stock losses by about three quarters.

For animals you can count on, the game farms outside town are the place. Thakadu describes plains game on its land and a floodlit water hole next to its restaurant.