Main bids farewell to Botswana after 45 years of adventure
Phillip Segadika | Thursday March 19, 2026 11:10
Armed with the statutes and fortified by righteous indignation that “makgoa ba a re zwakala”, I delivered a firm lecture quoting the law with enthusiasm and leaving little room for ambiguity. I was prepared for an entitled, spirited rebuttal. Instead, I encountered something disarming. Mike’s attitude, his genuine remorse, and his willingness to accept corrections transformed what could have been an adversarial exchange into the beginning of an enduring professional friendship. After forty-five years of traversing Botswana’s vast plains, rocky outcrops, ancient ruins and salt pans, Michael Paul Livingstone Main is saying his goodbyes. At 83, he leaves not as a stranger departing a posting, but as a man whose intellectual and emotional map is permanently overlaid with the contours of this land.
Born in the United Kingdom during the Second World War, he never quite met his biological parents, who were both working in an army base in Scotland where he was born. It was only at 18 that he was told by his adoptive parents of the circumstances around his birth and upbringing. His early years were spent between the UK, the Gold Coast (now Ghana), Ireland, Tanganyika (now Tanzania), Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and eventually Botswana. Africa was his formative classroom, and he has travelled more in Africa than in Europe. Remote landscapes, long wanderings in the bush with dogs and a catapult, and solitude shaped a young man who would later become one of Botswana’s most ardent interpreters. With laughter, he speaks of his early academic journey, where a school report summarised the principal’s verdict to his guardians when he was dismissed: “wasting our time and your money”. In 1961, at 18 and a half, he was in Rhodesia when he joined the British South Africa Police. He excelled, but the changing political climate in Zimbabwe narrowed career prospects. Undeterred, he pursued a Civil Service Law qualification and then completed a BA through UNISA while working full-time. An MBA at the University of Cape Town followed, sponsored by Rhodesian Breweries, and that was to catapult him later to Botswana on transfer in 1981. He recalls, “They transferred me to Botswana, where I worked with Lawrence Lekalake running KMS, which oversaw KBL, Segwana, Game Trackers, Marakanelo Hotels and BBL (Botswana Breweries Limited). I served a 2-year contract in Botswana with SAB (South African Breweries), but saw that the commercial world was not for me. Game Trackers lured me into and introduced me to the Botswana bush. I was quickly hooked!” What was meant to be a professional posting became a lifelong attachment. It is here in Botswana that he also met his sweetheart of many years, Kerstin from Sweden, who was then working for Radio Botswana on the schools’ education program. He also met a man who was to place knowledge into his passion, Alec Campbell, the doyen of Botswana’s archaeology. Through fieldwork at Tsodilo Hills, the Okavango and throughout Botswana, Campbell opened for Mike Main a deeper reading of the landscape. With a wife who equally loved traversing Africa on 4x4 and Campbell’s mentorship, Mike Main was set. With Gaborone as his base, he also pulled and harnessed his background in the corporate world, establishing a business that allowed him to do leadership training, travel, tour guiding and writing. I remember once flying Ethiopian Airways and reading Mike Main's breathtaking in-flight magazine article on Great Zimbabwe. His photographs revealed a mastery of the camera lens and the dexterity of a man whose product few editors would reject. Although he never formally trained as an archaeologist, Main’s contribution to Botswana’s heritage landscape is substantial. Over a decade of management and team-building courses conducted in Sowa Pan and the Tswapong Hills led to the recording of more than 100 archaeological sites. These discoveries, along with associated artefacts, were documented and submitted to the National Museum. In addition, he located and reported several previously unrecorded Zimbabwe Culture ruins. His book on the 13th Century Stone walls of Zimbabwe shows his passion for this time period, and he still believes Botswana is under-selling this part of its heritage, of which, in his count, there are over 130 Zimbabwe-type sites. Mike Main has followed up on this network of cultural heritage that stretched from the Makgadikgadi to the Mozambican coast and endured for more than six centuries. For Main, this is not someone else’s story; it is Botswana’s own. When I asked Mike Main what his favourite Botswana spot was, two landscapes had the deepest imprint on him. The Makgadikgadi Pans, with their vast silence and archaeological traces of deep time, and Tsodilo, with its rock art and spiritual gravitas. In both, he found what he describes as peace and perspective. For Kerstin, however, there is no better place in Botswana than the confluence of the Shashe-Limpopo for its uncelebrated paradise where a myriad of wildlife roam this unique Tuli location in serenity, and yet hundreds of kilometres away from the expanse of Botswana’s other paradise, the Okavango. Main’s intellectual life was equally expansive. His personal library, now dispersed, once included complete runs of Botswana Notes and Records, the works of Alec Campbell and Thomas Tlou, the diaries of early explorers, and numerous accounts of southern African history. He read voraciously from childhood, a habit inherited from his mother. Writing, he says, came naturally. I must admit I was green-eyed to learn that his collection was placed for sale on social media, and a buyer with a good offer won, taking the library to South Africa. As a salve to my concern about his library, I was consoled to learn that Main donated more than 5,000 colour slides, meticulously archived in plastic sleeves, to the Botswana National Archives. These slides captured decades of work and represent field surveys, ruins, landscapes and people. In an age of digital abundance, they remain a tangible record of analogue dedication. Mike Main’s published works reflect that fluency and field experience: Kalahari, Life’s Variety from Dune to Delta; Zambezi, Journey of a River; multiple editions of Visitor’s Guide to Botswana; African Adventurer’s Guide to Botswana; Picturesque Botswana; Culture Smart Botswana; and Palaces of Stone – Zimbabwe Palaces in Southern Africa. Collectively, they shaped how countless visitors encountered Botswana’s landscapes and heritage. Now he departs for Sweden, the homeland of his wife, Kerstin. What will he miss? The people, certainly. The landscapes and the silences. Looking back, Main expresses no regrets. He arrived when Botswana’s heritage sector was opening intellectually and institutionally. For him, it was a frontier of knowledge and adventure. He is an optimist and says Botswana is at the crossroads, but with its current challenges, solutions will emerge. Creativity and imagination, he insists, will be essential in challenging economic times. In truth, Mike Main did not merely live in Botswana. He read it, walked it, documented it, and argued for it. As he now exchanges the vast Makgadikgadi horizons for the Scandinavian forests and the Stockholm Archipelago, Botswana retains a gum print of his steps on pans, hills, ruins, and in archives waiting for future scholars to rediscover. Tsamayang ka Pula, the Mains !.
*Phillip Segadika is Chief Curator at the Botswana National Museum and Director of the Dupakwala Heritage Studio. He writes in his personal capacity.