Our heritage

Sandy Grant | Wednesday January 22, 2014 17:08

 

With a bit more thought it seemed that life here then was probably not so different to that in remoter parts of the USA.

With no household power, lighting came from paraffin and gas lamps, the latter being the brighter of the two but with a mantle which was invariably half demolished by insects attracted to it, and by, of course the ever reliable Tilley lamp. 

There were no fuel stops only a few scattered garages.  For obvious reasons, there were few saloon cars, most vehicle owners used trucks, either the work horse Bedford or the Chevrolet or the first of the new Japanese vehicles.  All of them carried a water bag in front as a matter of routine.

The roads were all dirt roads, some being relatively okay, others fairly diabolical. Bush drags throwing up clouds of dust, were used to smoothen the road surface. 

Constant dragging lowered the road levels which, when it rained, were converted into long lengths of canal. Given the way that people today overtake at high speed, regardless of situation or circumstance, it is likely that few of those drag tractor drivers would survive were they in use today.

There were few telephones, many of those being party lines, and everyone knew the operator who kept the whole system working. 

From London, I once had to ring Phil Steenkamp when he was DC in Francistown. The operator told me that he had just left his office for lunch but she would connect me to his house in about five minutes.

It worked in ways like that! People who wanted hot water constructed donkey boilers for themselves and relied on paraffin fridges to give them something cold when the weather got really hot.  An uneven wick, a poor adjustment or the loss of the baffle meant either that the chimney smoked or the fridge battled to keep anything even slightly cold.  In order to wash or bath, people used a zinc tub.  Items made of plastic had still to appear. 

There were no specialist shops, only general stores and away from the few hotels, there were no bars, only shebeens where the lady owners, utilising one of the few business opportunities available to them, sold, as perhaps they still do, nips, dops, half jacks, and straights.

The few houses equipped with flush toilets were either government owned or belonged to expatriate traders.  Government houses sported spacious netted verandahs, and were invariably equipped with a fireplace and parquet flooring. 

All offices relied on typewriters, used much carbon paper, foolscap and various kinds of roneo/gestetner machines. And lastly, the inhabitants of this country were invariably described as African, it being only sometime in the 1970s that the term ‘Batswana’ came into more regular use.