Lobatse

The house with a plank for a door, and the town that hid Mandela

Fish Keitseng was plastering a wall on the afternoon of 11 January 1962 when a car pulled up outside. He looked out and saw Nelson Mandela, driven, as he put it years later, by “an Indian chap”. The driver was Amien Cajee, a friend of Ahmed Kathrada. The house, in the township of Peleng, was not finished. Mandela was given a share of the one usable room with Keitseng and his wife Sina. Keitseng remembered that it had no proper door, only a piece of wood hung from the wall.

David Motsamayi on Peleng Hill

Mandela stayed about a week under the name David Motsamayi. By his host’s account he was up at five every morning to train, walked over Peleng Hill and out along the Kanye road, and ate once a day. Mandela’s own memoir remembers the hills above the town, a young companion called Max Mlonyeni, and a troop of baboons he followed for a while because they moved like soldiers.

The way on was by air. A Captain Herbert Bartaune ran a small charter outfit, Bechuanaland Safaris, out of Lobatse, and after the Sharpeville shootings of 1960 its light aircraft became the airborne leg of the escape route, by way of Kasane to Mbeya and Dar es Salaam. Mandela took off from the Lobatse airstrip on 19 January. He came back on the evening of 23 July in one of Bartaune’s planes, which put down at Kanye because Keitseng thought Lobatse too closely watched. Within two hours he was over the border at Pioneer Gate. On 5 August he was arrested outside Durban.

The yard still gives things up. In February 2014 a British film company, preparing a feature built around that stay, brought metal detectors to the Keitseng plot. The police first told them to stop digging. Town gossip had it that they were after the gun Mandela was given in Ethiopia. It was a pistol, and it left Lobatse long ago. What came out of the ground was spent ammunition, metal ornaments and old rice sacks, and the sacks interested the National Museum’s archaeologist most. The deeper ones were marked in pounds and the upper ones in kilograms, which dates the layers.

Tar laid for the King’s train

On 17 April 1947 the White Train, running half an hour behind its own pilot train, brought King George VI, Queen Elizabeth and the two princesses to what was then spelt Lobatsi. The administration tarred a road from the station for the day, the first tar anywhere in the protectorate.

The Sunday Standard went back to the photographs in 2021, and they are uncomfortable. Bathoen II of the Bangwaketse and Tshekedi Khama, regent of the Bangwato, both turned out in British military uniform, and the paper found not one black face on the dais. Princess Elizabeth, four days short of 21, walked along a line of four young Herero women in Victorian dresses.

Much of colonial Lobatse has gone missing since. Asked in 2012 about the old British commissioner’s residence, the mayor said she did not know where it was. The house Seretse Khama lived in has been pulled down. Radio Bechuanaland first went on air from the town’s police station, at 500 watts. What survives is the Cumberland Hotel, put up when Lobatse looked likely to be the capital and remembered as the first hotel in the country to take guests of any colour, and the mosque of 1967, the oldest in Botswana.

Shelled from the south, judged from the north

In the South African War burghers of the Marico commando were in Lobatse by late October 1899. Plumer’s column came down the line from Rhodesia on 6 March 1900 and had the telegraph working the next day. Nine days later General Snyman, who was besieging Mafeking, came up fast and shelled the position in the evening. Lieutenant Arthur Tyler was killed, a Lieutenant Chapman was taken prisoner, and the British fell back up the railway to Crocodile Pools, south of Gaborone.

In January 2011 the Court of Appeal, sitting in Lobatse, gave the San of the Central Kalahari the right to sink boreholes for their own water. By August 2012 both that court and the High Court’s headquarters had gone to Gaborone, leaving a regional division, and the Cumberland lost its lunchtime lawyers.

The writer Bessie Head came under a different kind of order. Early in 1971, after she hit a neighbour and pasted up a notice at the post office denouncing the president, a court sent her to the mental hospital in Lobatse. She was home by the end of June and began A Question of Power once she was recovering.

The tortoise and the toad

Two animals carry the town’s old spelling. In 1927 John Hyacinth Power, a Waterford-born schoolmaster in Kimberley and the honorary curator of reptiles and amphibians at the museum there, described a small hinge-back tortoise from here and called it lobatsiana. The type specimen sits in the Natural History Museum in London. It grows to about 17 cm, can close the back of its shell over its hind legs and tail, lives on rocky hillsides with thorn and bushwillow woodland in this corner of Botswana and across the border, and is now listed as vulnerable.

Power’s other find that year is far easier. The guttural toad, sometimes still called the Lobatsi toad, is very common across southern Africa. Males call from the surface of standing water with a snore every three seconds or so, and October and November are the main breeding months.

Cape vultures breed on the cliff at Otse, 20 km up the Gaborone road. It is not a big colony any more. Bird surveys counted over a hundred pairs in the 1960s and about fifty a season after a long decline, and the far larger colonies are now in the Tswapong Hills in the east. In 2015 the Sunday Standard reported that a group of Otse youths were guiding visitors to the breeding site.