On a Multigenerational Safari in Botswana, Family Comes into Bright, Beautiful Focus

It’s late afternoon in the Okavango Delta and a newborn elephant is learning to drink. Up goes her wrinkly bottom, down goes her flimsy trunk. Tossing aside the unfamiliar appendage, she submerges her face in the flood plain and with Cupid’s bow mouth sips her first muddy draft. Her mother oversees the milestone. Though nourished by milk, the calf must learn to sip from the delta’s immense cup of life.

“First, the babies drink with their mouths, before they know how to pour in water from their trunks,” says Gaonyadiwe “Spokes” Ntshwabi, our guide and founder of Classified Safaris. The herd signals its encouragement; our elated human clan observes the triumphant moment.

Kinship has united my family for milestone celebrations of our own: the significant birthdays of my sister, Brenda, and brother-in-law Adrian. Fourteen of us – siblings, husbands, young adult cousins, our honorary “sister” and two sons-in-law – set off from the northern Botswana city of Kasane, just under two hours by plane from Johannesburg. Our seven-day mobile safari will take us to Savuti, a region encompassed by Chobe National Park, and Moremi Game Reserve.

We’re a close-knit crew, still governed by a familial hierarchy. The “olds” hop into Ntshwabi’s LandCruiser, where my youngest sister, Jennifer, and I are soon scolded by a third sibling for rowdy behaviour (cheeky, considering the only taciturn member is my husband, Terence). Later, when we’ve fallen into reverent silence, dear family friend Pauline asks why the cackling has subsided, “I’ve come to associate it with safari in Botswana.” The “youngs”, meanwhile, are having their own fun in guide Mmolai Rephatlaletse’s vehicle – appropriately, since he and Ntshwabi are also cousins.

The mood turns sombre when our group is schooled in the great circle of life. It’s dusk and a juvenile bull elephant, felled by lions, lies beside a waterhole. Marabou storks survey the scene from the treetops; Cape turtle doves draw giddy wreaths across the flaming sky. The culprits are in attendance: cubs romping, lions drowsy with plenitude and a lioness safeguarding the kill. An elephant pauses for a trunk salute. Then she lunges towards the predators. The cubs scatter but their mother is resolute; she will not give up her prey. The aggrieved elephant dissolves into the thickets behind her departing herd. Our own family elder, Adrian, sums up the wonderment. “One day I’m sitting in Sydney, the next I’m in the African bush watching this,” he says as he sweeps his arm across the wild sage-scented tableau. “It’s a parallel universe.” Elephants are known to mourn their dead, Ntshwabi tells us, but mothers also dismiss males from the herd when they’re old enough to fend for themselves. “If he doesn’t have enough time to find his cousins and uncles, that’s when he would have been vulnerable to the lions.”

After dark, our group’s cousins and uncles chat around the campfire as the heavens cast their spell. Venus hangs low; the Southern Cross dawdles beyond the horizon. “You can see the whole Milky Way up there,” says my son, Vincent. Our campsite is a collection of two-person tents arranged on the bone-white sand. It’s an improvement on the childhood camping trips my siblings and I took with our parents in Mozambique and our homeland, South Africa, when there were no comfy beds, solar-charged lamps, open-roofed ensuites with long-drop toilets and warm bucket showers. Or sundowners served by six camp staffers.

“A chenin blanc – crisp like the lions,” says tonight’s barman, Amen Shando. Chefs Maps Keorapetse and Fruit Mogapi conjure superb meals from an oven dug into the sand and covered with coals, including tender beef from Ntshwabi’s farm outside Kasane, fresh veggies and nightly desserts. They’re served with a chivalrous edict: “Ladies go first.” And for the vegetarian, “we have vegetable-sausage stew”, says Clinton Keorapetse, Maps’ nephew.

Next morning, our sons help lash luggage to the car roofs and the staff decamp for the journey south. Dunes forming the shores of the ancient Lake Makgadikgadi rise in the west as we traverse the Mababe Depression. Cicadas seethe; impalas trim woolly caper bushes into neat pentagon shapes. Beyond them stretch alabaster pans stubbled with vegetation. Elephant herds spill across the horizon. “It feels surreal – more like a Hollywood set than reality,” says my son-in-law, Rob. “It looks like Jurassic Park.”

The staff greet us like family when we arrive at our private campsite in Khwai, tucked into the Khwai River’s riparian thickets within the Moremi Game Reserve, on the eastern fringes of the delta. They’ve reassembled our tents and Maps has prepared that evening’s dinner. Shando serves our now-customary “Gin & Ts”. Hyena whoops lullaby us to sleep and we awake to bees irate at an interloping honey badger and the doleful cry of an African fish eagle. “Much better than roosters, no?” says my brother, Charles.

The aquatic landscape is cast in luxuriant morning light. Red lechwe antelope squelch through the channels; African wild dog spoor laces a forest floor strewn with fallen mopane leaves turned a coppery red. Reading the ground like a map, Ntshwabi traces the endangered canines to a clearing, where the females of the matriarchal pack are feeding their pups.

On our final night, the family equilibrium is upended. “For the last supper, we’ll be making a change,” says Clinton. “If you don’t mind, men first.” Protestations erupt from the women. Hierarchies notwithstanding, we’re like those African wild dogs: a matriarchal clan.

Before leaving for Maun the next morning, we gather around the embers of last night’s campfire to thank Ntshwabi and Rephatlaletse and their own warm-hearted group. “I don’t know how you pulled off this incredible, celebratory journey,” says my nephew, Luke. “We have to pinch ourselves.” Filled with gratitude, we respond, “Amen.” All eyes turn to Shonda and we laugh. “I have one Amen,” says Ntshwabi, nodding in the barman’s direction. “Now I’m looking for a Hallelujah.”

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