Palapye

Brandy under the bed in Khama's dry capital

Lord Randolph Churchill reached Palapye at about five in the afternoon on 13 November 1891, four days out from the police camp at Macloutsie, with mules that could hardly move. The last thirty miles had been sand to the axles. The Bechuanaland Exploration Company’s agent took him into a hut, reached into a recess under the bed and brought out a bottle of brandy. It was kept there because Khama III allowed no alcohol in his country and punished anyone who broke the rule. Churchill, Winston’s father, wrote that his brandy and soda was sweeter than nectar.

This was not the Palapye on the A1. It was the old capital under the Tswapong Hills, by the village now called Malaka. In 1890 and 1891 it lay on the wagon road to Mashonaland, and several of the people who came through wrote it up.

Three visitors, one grassy square

A Cape Argus reporter was there in October 1890, when Cecil Rhodes and the High Commissioner were in town. He found a town less than fifteen months old that he reckoned covered twenty square miles. The archaeologist Theodore Bent spent a week in 1891 on his way to dig at Great Zimbabwe and described a large shaded square with a stream through it where the wagons outspanned. Churchill wrote of a green full of animals, poultry and children that put him in mind of an English village.

Nobody had a head count. The Argus man says 30,000 people and Churchill upwards of 35,000, while Bent gives 15,000 as the number who moved from Shoshong in two months.

They all met Khama, and none could place his age. Bent and the Argus man both called him sixty, and Bent thought he could pass for twenty years younger. Churchill saw a man of about forty and suspected he was a good deal older. He was probably in his middle fifties.

Churchill’s one morning in town was stranger. Hundreds of Khama’s men had spent four months laying the telegraph wire through Mashonaland for Rhodes’s chartered company, and a police officer had come up from Mafeking with the wages in gold and silver. Churchill watched them walk home past his camp with blankets and beads, and a good many with new Martini-Henry rifles. Khama called on him that evening and afterwards sent over a kaross of leopard skins. Churchill sent back a silver flask and called it his water bottle.

The telegraph had reached town on 14 October 1890. The missionary James Hepburn wrote that Khama tapped the instrument himself for a message to Montshiwa at Mafeking, and was much amused to get an answer in minutes from a place a month away by ox wagon.

Why the church has no roof

The ruin people photograph at Old Palapye started with a cable. On 21 January 1891 Hepburn wired the London Missionary Society: “Seat 1,000, stone, lime, iron,” and asked for plans. The congregation had already raised £3,000, a figure both Bent and the Argus man report. He wanted an iron roof because his family’s huts had nearly burnt down and lightning had picked up one of his servants and thrown him eighteen yards.

The Hepburns lived for two years in a shed of poles plastered with mud and dung, because he would not build a house before the church. His wife’s health gave way and she left for the Cape in September 1891. He had told her he would never preach in the building. He fell out with Khama, went to England before it was finished and died there in 1893.

After the town was burnt in 1902 the church kept its roof for another sixteen years. The historian Neil Parsons traced why. The Bangwato would not start a new church in Serowe while the future of the old mission buildings was unsettled. Serowe’s church, put up by the government’s contractor, opened in June 1915 and was so badly built that students from the Tiger Kloof mission school rebuilt it in 1916. Only in the second half of 1918 was the roofing Hepburn had argued for taken off and carted to Serowe.

The typist who lasted two months

Bessie Head worked in modern Palapye as a typist for about two months in 1966, and it was here that payment arrived for a story called The Woman from America, which the trust that looks after her memory calls her turning point. Then she quarrelled with her boss and was sacked. She took the train north to Francistown and wrote When Rain Clouds Gather there.

Vultures, and what you will really see

The Argus reporter found the kloof behind the mission alive with birds, with dassies and baboons on the rock walls. Bent mentions baboons on the heights above the waterfall. Baboons are still the animal a walker in the gorges is likely to meet. Leopard, brown hyaena and kudu are listed for the hills, but one birder who knows the Gootau gorge reports only signs of hyaena.

The birds worth the trip are the Cape vultures. Wendy and Remigio Borello studied six nesting cliffs in the Tswapong Hills from 1992 to 1999. Then nobody counted for 18 years. When a team went back in 2017 only three were in use: Bonwalenong above Moremi, Manong Yeng near Gootau and a small one near Lerala. At the two big colonies they counted 261 nests that year and 362 the next, about level with the 1990s. The chicks were the worry. In December 2017 three with deformed wings were found at the bottom of Moremi Gorge, and a year later twelve lay dead. The researchers put it down to too little calcium, and in 2018 they began putting broken bone out for the adults.

Cape vultures lay mostly between April and July and the chick is on the ledge for months afterwards, so the cool season suits both the birds and the walking. That same write-up of Gootau says you need the chief’s leave, about two hours of scrambling up a dry stream bed through thorn scrub, and good binoculars or a telescope when you get there.