Kanye

The chief who would not hear of the dead rising

On 1 July 1824 Robert Moffat left his mission near Kuruman for the town of a man his neighbours had warned him against. Makaba II of the Bangwaketse was in his sixties and had spent thirty years taking other people’s cattle. Moffat went up with a party of Griqua elephant hunters under Berend Berend. The capital they reached is Kwakwe in the old books. That is Kgwakgwe, the hill just south of modern Kanye.

“I have slain my thousands”

Makaba met him laughing. He wondered aloud that anyone would walk unarmed into the town of “such a villain” as he was said to be, and announced that his heart was “whiter than milk”. Moffat, for his part, was taken with the housekeeping. In Missionary Labours, published in 1842, he wrote that the Bangwaketse houses were no bigger than those of the Batlhaping he lived among but built with more taste and comfort, the round walls and uprights set true by eye alone, the yard floors “smooth as paper”. No dairymaid in England, he said, kept her wooden bowl cleaner.

The sermon went less well. One Sunday he found the old chief sitting among his headmen while they cut and sewed skin cloaks, and began on the resurrection. Makaba questioned him closely. Would his father rise? The men killed in battle? The ones eaten by lions and hyenas? Told yes each time, he called on his councillors to say whether they had ever heard such a thing, then bared his spear arm and ended the discussion: “I have slain my thousands, and shall they arise!” He did not want to hear it again.

Moffat was lucky to get home. The Griquas changed their minds about hunting and rode back with him, and at Pitsana about twenty of them, mounted and carrying guns, beat off an attack on Tauane’s Barolong that would otherwise have caught the missionary on the road. Makaba was not so lucky. His son Tshosa had already risen against him the year before, and within months of Moffat leaving he was dead, killed fighting the Bakololo. There is a primary school in Kanye named after him.

The eye Sechele took

A century on, the person holding the Bangwaketse chieftaincy together was an old woman with one eye. Gagoangwe was a daughter of Sechele of the Bakwena, the chief David Livingstone converted. As a girl she put out a servant’s eye. Her father, reading his Old Testament literally, let the servant take one of hers. She married a chief called Pilane, left him in 1875 to run off with Bathoen, heir to the Bangwaketse, and only married him in church fifteen years later.

Their son Seepapitso III is the chief shot dead in the kgotla on 18 June 1916, a killing covered in the timeline above. Two details from that day are less often told. The brothers had argued that same morning over money Moepitso felt was owed to him, and Moepitso was caught because he left his spectacles lying with the gun. The dying chief is said to have asked, in Setswana, why his brother was killing him.

Gagoangwe took the regency herself in 1923, already very ill, and held it just long enough to pass it to her daughter Ntebogang. Ntebogang was the first woman to sit on the protectorate’s Native Advisory Council. Clinics opened at Kanye, Manyana and far-off Lehututu in her time, paid for by a levy on the whole tribe, and she lived until 1979.

Ducks, bass and a leopard you won’t see

Mmakgodumo Dam has been a gazetted bird sanctuary since 1992, the protected ground running 1.6 km out from the water. Mike and Jeremy Brook, writing up Botswana’s protected areas in 2015, reported that the monthly counts there turned up more than twenty species, South African shelduck, yellow-billed duck and Maccoa duck among them. The Maccoa is the one birders would drive out for, a scarce diving duck across southern Africa. Nobody seems to have published the counts month by month, so treat one as a bonus.

The dam has bass in it. An angler told Mmegi in 2009 that the one he caught was so big the fish must have bred here for generations, and that bass lived nowhere else in Botswana. Both claims are one man’s word. The dam also holds bream and barbel, sits in a stand of eucalyptus and is fed by an underground stream.

Pharing Gorge is three minutes’ drive away. The Brooks describe a waterfall with a plunge pool and trees growing straight out of bare rock, and the government’s heritage notes mention old stone walling beside the paths. A Mmegi reporter in 2009 found candle stumps and hearths on the rocks above it, left by spirit mediums, so if a group is busy there, leave them to it. Wikivoyage lists leopards and baboons for these hills. Baboons are believable on any morning. A leopard in daylight, this close to 48,000 people, is not something to plan around. Kgosi Malope II wants the area fenced and stocked with game, a wish repeated at the dam’s festival in October 2025, which tells you how little is there now.

What came out of the hills

Moffat’s Kwakwe turned out to be full of manganese. It was mined from 1957 into the 1960s, by rough methods, until the price dropped and the shaft became too dangerous, and a tunnel about 100 m long still runs into the hillside. Don’t go looking for it. The hill is a mining lease again, and in October 2023 a minister stood up in the Kanye kgotla to ask residents to keep off it.

The other mine was asbestos, out at Moshaneng. A 2014 study of the closed site found shafts that had never been sealed properly and asbestos fibres in every air sample, so admire that one from the road too.