Oxwaggons

When diamond money arrived in the mid-1970s, the oxwaggon, was doomed. Its demise occurred almost overnight. Given its extraordinarily long life span and importance, it’s surprising that no one, as far as I know, has yet produced a history of this remarkable mode of transport in Southern Africa and certainly not in this country.

Fortunately, we know much about the oxwaggon from the accounts of many missionaries and traders such as Robert Moffat.

Indeed, without navigable rivers and lakes in this part of the world, the ability of those people to travel would have been extremely limited although Livingstone did somehow manage to travel enormous distances on foot.

Editor's Comment
A step in the right direction

It has only been a month since the newly elected government, the Umbrella for Democratic Change (UDC), took power, and there are already a lot of changes. Across different ministries, ministers are hard at work. Following heavy rainfall and storms that hit Francistown recently, the Minister of State Presidency, Moeti Mohwasa, made a commitment that government will assist those affected by the heavy rains. Mohwasa, when addressing the media in...

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