Gweta

The post office tree that fell at seven one morning

At seven in the morning on 7 January 2016 all six trunks of Chapman’s Baobab went over, almost together. The researchers who wrote it up recorded a sound like thunder and a cloud of dust, then trunks lying in three directions with their roots in the air. It had stood 22.6 m tall with roots running out as far as 65 m. Tshwa speakers called it Xaugam, the lion’s tail.

Adrian Patrut, a Romanian chemist who has radiocarbon dated most of Africa’s big baobabs, had taken wood from it in June 2015, seven months earlier, and came back for the wreck. His 2019 paper reads like a post-mortem. The hollow that travellers used as a letter box began as a fire scar, perhaps in the 1600s, and rotted through three trunks until it was more than 5 m across. Where two of them joined, the tree was resting on a column of half-rotten wood 50 cm thick.

Then the rain did not come. The first showers normally arrive in September. That season nothing fell until February, a first in 100 years. A baobab stands up partly because of the weight of water in its wood, usually as much as 79 per cent. In June 2015 two of Chapman’s trunks were already down to about half. After the fall they measured around 40 per cent.

Younger than the brochure says

You will be told the baobabs around Gweta are 4,000 years old. Planet Baobab says so of its own trees, and Chapman’s used to be credited with as many as 6,000. Patrut’s oldest sample, from close to the heart of the biggest trunk, dated to about AD 669. The six trunks turned out to be three generations: one of 1,350 to 1,400 years, three of 800 to 1,000 and two of only 500 to 600. Old baobabs grow as a ring of stems and replace the ones they lose, so the giant that the hunters carved was partly a regrowth.

It was still the 11th oldest African baobab anyone has dated, and the oldest of those are something over 2,000 years, not 4,000. Of the 13 oldest, nine have died or lost their oldest stems since 2005, every one of them in southern Africa.

Reading the bark on Green’s tree

Green’s Baobab is 11 km north-west of the fallen one and very much alive. The name comes from the boldest lettering on it, Green’s Expedition 1858 to 1859, cut with a squirrel that was the family crest. Fred and Charles Green were Canadian brothers who hunted and traded up to Ngamiland. Alec Campbell, who went through the signatures for Botswana Notes and Records in 2010, thought they stopped here early in 1859.

They were not the first. Low on the east side is H v Z 1851, for Hendrik van Zyl, though Campbell reckoned 1854 the likelier year. Van Zyl later built a mansion near Ghanzi, and in 1877 he and his three sons drove 103 elephants into a muddy pan west of the Okavango and shot the lot. He had a name for beating and killing the Khoe of the Ghanzi country, and in 1880 they killed him.

PH Viljoen was cut about 11 July 1852 by a 19-year-old travelling with his father and with James Chapman. Chapman was at his own tree on the 10th. A small cross and another 1859 mark the camp of the London Missionary Society party on its way to the Makololo at Linyanti, where most of them died of fever the next year.

One date is older than all of these, according to the sheet Botswana Post printed with its baobab stamps in 2022: 1771. Possibly a Portuguese traveller.

Elephants have found the tree too. Sarah Venter of the Baobab Foundation saw freshly stripped bark and broken branches in December 2023, the first such damage in decades, and a fence too far gone to stop them.

A spring on the old road to Mopipi

Gutsha Pan, a couple of hundred metres from Green’s and marked by a clump of palms, held the only permanent spring in the area, and the old trading route across Ntwetwe from Gweta to Mopipi ran past it. The Bradt guide says the pits San hunters dug there and lined with poisoned stakes, and the calcrete blinds they hid behind, can still be made out.

Neither tree is easy to find. Bradt warns that the tracks west of Chapman’s go on without end and calls a GPS close to essential. One self-drive party who tried it in mid-April got lost in the maze and ended up in a flooded field.

Meerkats with a minder

The animal people come for is small. A group of meerkats lives near the edge of the pan and is used to people, though Planet Baobab is careful to call them semi-habituated and not tame. One couple describe crouching within a foot of them for twenty minutes while they dug for grubs. By their account a local man stays with the group from dawn until it goes underground at nightfall, and tells the guides where to find it. Both places to stay offer a sunrise visit.

Big game is thin in the dry months. The brown hyaenas the pans are known for are not a Gweta sighting. The clan that visitors got to see was one Glyn Maude habituated to vehicles for his research at Jack’s Camp, on the north-west side of Ntwetwe.

Then there are the frogs the village is named for. A male African bullfrog can weigh 1.4 kg, and breeding starts once something like 65 mm of rain has fallen over two days.

The dry-season quad bike trip ends with a night out on the pan. The same couple wrote that the white dust hangs in the still air behind each bike, so riders soon learn to spread out sideways. There were no tents, just bivvy bags laid on the salt with a hot-water bottle inside, and they still woke cold in the small hours.