Selebi Phikwe

Glasgow steam engines at a Botswana nickel smelter

Until October 2016 the BCL mine railway still ran on steam. Two of its engines, numbers 6 and 7, were built by the North British Locomotive Company of Glasgow in 1948. The Railway Magazine reckoned them the last two North British steam locomotives still in service anywhere on earth. Then, on the morning of 8 October, the cabinet minister Kitso Mokaila told the workforce that the mine had stopped that day. No. 6 is the engine now standing on a plinth on the main street.

BCL ran its ore trains on what the big railways were throwing out: Garratts and three Henschel engines of the early 1950s from Rhodesia Railways, then South African 19Ds, the class nicknamed Dolly. As late as 2011 the mine bought two more that had stood abandoned at Jan Kempdorp for about twenty years, and had the first of them working by June 2012. The whole fleet was idle after the closure and up for sale by the end of 2018.

Found with bags of soil

Nobody stumbled on this ore. Roan Selection Trust, a Copperbelt company, began talking to the Bangwato leadership in 1956 and got its agreement in 1959, signed by Rasebolai Kgamane with Seretse Khama and Oteng Mphoeng. That agreement created Bamangwato Concessions, the BCL of the name. Its geologists then walked lines picked off aerial photographs and bagged soil every 61 metres.

In March and April 1963 the samples drew a copper and nickel stain 1.6 km long at Selebi. The first drilling, eight shallow holes in 1964, was so poor that the rig was stood down. Three of the holes hinted that things improved further down, so they tried again in 1965, and it did. Phikwe was pinned down in 1967. That was the year De Beers geologists found Orapa, on 1 March. Eight years earlier three small diamonds, the first authenticated in Botswana, had turned up in the gravels of the Motloutse, the sand river that runs past Mmadinare. The colonial police who kept a camp on it from 1890 spelt it Macloutsie. By 1971, with the open pit at Phikwe about to be dug, the drillers had put down 197 holes and more than 53 km of drilling.

Seven years to get a furnace going

The smelter was a flash furnace, lit late in 1973. In 2006 BCL’s own engineers were still describing it as the only one of its kind on the continent. It was slow to get going. By their account it took about seven years to reach the output it was designed for, and the whole of its first full run produced less metal than the plant was making in a month by 2006. After an expansion in 1980 came fifteen years in which low metal prices meant next to nothing was spent on it.

What left town was never finished metal. It was a granulated matte of nickel, copper and cobalt, sent to refineries in Zimbabwe and Norway. The gas went up a 154 metre stack. One guide written while the furnace was running mentions a slight smell of sulphur in town.

The open pit was worked out by 1980 and after that everything came from underground, eventually from more than a kilometre down at Selebi. The mineworkers’ union counted 5,500 BCL jobs lost in 2016 and said the closure came without any warning. The buyers called their restart project Tsholofelo, which means hope, and in 2022 spoke of drilling holes nearly 1.5 km deep to see what is left. Their own technical report calls the old smelter outdated and in poor condition, and they do not plan to light it again.

The mine named more than the town. The football club is Nico United, for nickel and copper, known as Majombolo, and it won the FA Challenge Cup in 1986 and 1987. Phikwe, as it is more often called, signed a letter of intent in 2015 with Tsumeb, Namibia’s smelter town, and a fuller agreement followed in November 2022.

Tigerfish in the drinking water

Shashe Dam, about 80 km to the north-west, was built between 1970 and 1973 to supply the new mining town. Letsibogo came later and does a bigger job now: its water goes down a 400 km pipeline to Gaborone. The wall is 28 metres high and holds back 18 square kilometres of water when the dam is full. In August 2012 it was down to a third.

Before the wall went up, fish from the Limpopo used to run up the Motloutse when it flooded. A bird count along the river in January 1989 found 120 species, most of them small insect eaters of the bush. Open water has changed the list towards waterbirds, though I have not found a published count from the lake itself, so take the birding on trust. In 2009 tigerfish, a species that belongs in the Limpopo system, were put in as a trial. Researchers who followed fish moved here from Schroda Dam found they behaved as if the water suits them, but too few are said to have been released to breed, so nobody should travel here expecting to catch one. There are two accounts of getting at the water and they do not match. One has water sports on it at weekends. The other says access is hard and that fishing it means camping on the bank.

Do not expect game in or around town. The exception is elephant. They move through the country around Mmadinare, where they wreck crops, and researchers there say the dams have given them water and they now stay longer. For anything more, carry on east to the Northern Tuli Game Reserve.

If you have a choice of months, June and July nights drop to about 7°C and the days are mild. January is the wetest month.