(On the B8 in Kavango Land above the Rinderpest Fence: a kraal)

We are up very early so as not to be on the road after dark for the long drive ahead. When we had returned from Otjituuo to Roy’s in the dark we encountered 4 or 5 kudu on the gravel road. Kudu tend to be as unpredictable and skittish as American deer but are more the size of moose.

We re inflate our tires at Roy’s but use our own electric pump powered by the truck’s battery. The plastic tubing again proves to be unequal to the task: this time it blows a fuse on the cables and clamps arrangement attaching it to the battery. We complete the job using a muscle-powered floor pump (the old-fashioned backup) but this is shaky as the unit I have suffers the same problems as the electric pump (shoddy tubing and components). I complete the cock-up by damaging a half-rotten valve stem which will eventually develop a slow leak in a day or two.

We reach the veterinary fence on the B8 and here Will remarks that he is now “out of his zone of knowledge”. On one side of the fence the cattle are cordoned off from rinderpest (foot-and-mouth disease) and on the other are cattle unprotected from an epidemic scourge that altered African history in the 1890’s. The Africa of western popular imagination appears – this is Kavango Land. Kraals with thatched roofed buildings and rough wooden pickets and thorny brush piled at their base. Large numbers of people and cattle amble along the roadway (at intervals). The cattle small but with long, upward curving horns and the ubiquitous goats. The fence cordoning and isolation policy was also used in Botswana in the past to control the tsetse fly and the spread of sleeping sickness.

Labels: Calai, Rundu, Veterinary Fence

¶ 2:43 PM