As with everybody else, I have been to the top of Kgale and enjoyed the wonderful views it commands of the dramatically changing Gaborone below. I have also been to the top of Odi hill long before the BDF discouraged people from doing so, and also to the top of Modipe.
The three experiences were completely different. Modipe is one of the major obtrusions in the ancient geological Modipe Gabro complex. It is not only very old but also very large being three kilometres in length, a kilometre in width and rising 100 metres above the flat plains that surround it. Elsewhere in the country, people have routinely used hills for defensive purposes building homes either on a hill top, as at Kanye, or on the lower levels from where it was easy to withdraw under threat, to the more inaccessible higher levels. Settlements of the latter kind are Old Palapye, Mochudi, Lobatse, and Francistown.
The modern village of Modipane, however, is quite different. Intriguingly it is not situated underneath its great hill but a couple of kilometres away. This, however, was not always the case. In the early 1990s, the Phuthadikobo Museum decided that it was duty bound to try and undertake research of some kind on this hill for two simple reasons, the first being that no work had previously been done and the second because it was and is the major archaeological site in the entire Kgatleng district. Because it was able to find partners who were also interested in this idea, the museum was eventually able to undertake a major research project on the hill in the period 1992-95.
In cooperation with the York Archaeological Trust in the UK which was willing to second an experienced archaeologist, Nick Pearson to Phuthadikobo, Skill Share Africa, and the National Museum in Gaborone, it became possible to change a hope into a reality. Modipe’s old secrets would be unpicked - but only slowly, with enormous care and with real difficulty. Modipe protects itself. It does not invite visitors. Its black scree slopes are forbidding and formidable.
Its sides are steep, its few paths are strewn with loose, ankle breaking stones which are carefully hidden by grass during the wetter months, when the grass itself becomes treacherously slippery. When it rains, the road around the hill can quickly become impassable and new routes around it have to be found.
But bit by bit, new information began fascinatingly to emerge although what might have been the most important of the archaeological sites around the base of the hill had been destroyed by a stone crushing plant that had been given a licence, in effect, to wreck anything that it found. In his report, Pearson noted that ‘a major village of daga constructed huts had been obliterated from the landscape and all that remained was a disturbed pottery scatter and some broken daga lumps.’
People had indeed once lived both on the hill and at several places around its base, mostly in the period between 1600 and 1750. They had left behind them intriguing evidence of their years of occupation - potsherds, stone terraces, stone enclosures, two track ways bounded by low stone walling, many grinding stones, metal working furnace remains, the remains of their housing and of four people, a man and a woman and two children who had been buried there. After discussion with the Modipane headman and village, it was sensibly agreed that the remains of those four should be covered over and left undisturbed.
The Phuthadikobo Museum initiative produced important new information, which will be better understood as archaeological research provides the wider context in which Modipe must be understood. It also produced a rare compliment from the Pan Africa Archaeological Conference in Harare in 1995 which noted that it was rare anywhere in Africa for a small NGO museum to undertake extensive research on a site of major, national importance.
The problem with a major heritage hill such as Modipe, however, is that it has many facets to its nature and its past so that whilst the archaeologist can use his skills to help us to understand his part of the puzzle, the rest remains unknown to us. Archaeologists, for instance, can tell us nothing about Kgwanyape, the rain snake which flew, and perhaps still does, from the one rain hill, Modipe, to the other rain hill, Phuthadikobo in Mochudi.
Batswana seem to believe that it is better that not everything should be known; and in that they are not alone. Certain places, hills not least, should be allowed to retain their mystery. The guts of Kgale Hill are being steadily removed by the quarry, communication paraphernalia is planted on it, suburban houses crowd its lower levels, discarded rubbish insults it, and everybody and his aunt routinely runs to the top and down again.
If that hill once had integrity, it has none now. Phuthadikobo in Mochudi, still contrives to hold itself together by means of its remarkable, dignified old school building which helps the hill retain its links with an older past. But, as with Kgale, the old hill is being steadily absorbed into a society, which increasingly thinks only in terms of its consumer driven needs.
It leaves the hill stripped of its old integrity. But the Phuthadikobo Hill is large and even though it is situated in the middle of a fast modernising settlement, much of it is still untouched; and who knows, it may yet fight back. But what about Modipe?
Fortunately, Modipe is not under any immediate, modernising threat although the now abandoned quarry has disfigured much the western base of the hill. It is not on the way to anywhere of any significance and it keeps its aloof distance, even from Modipane.
There are any number of stories about it, of the sound of Kgwanyape passing over head, of voices of people heard on the hill and of the sounds of their routine activities such as chopping wood. There used to be too, stories of teams of oxwagons passing the hill which suddenly, inexplicably became unyoked. In other parts of the country, there are other hills about which such stories are told.
But that is no reason to take Modipe anything but very seriously. Go there on your own, perhaps start climbing and see how long it is before you begin to feel rather uneasy; and then decide that it’s only sensible to come down again!
