Day 2: “Your coefficient of friction…”

I have always wanted to venture to the outposts where some of the patients I treat in Tsabong come from. There is an axis, if you will, of villages and outposts from Tsabong extending east to the main highway and west to the SW corner of Botswana; by the Botswana, South Africa, and Namibia junction. an area of hundreds of thousands of square kilometers. So out to the village of Middlepits I went at the posted speed limit of 120km/hr. Just outside the village I was nailed by a speed trap on the newly paved road. As the speed limit, or so I thought, was 120km/hr and I was travelling at 110km/hr I thought that I was OK. I pulled over and was advised I was going well over the limit of 80km/hr, posted just once, about 10km back.

“Uh what’s the problem?” “You are over the speed limit.” “What’s the limit?” “80” “Huh? Why, the village is still about 5km from here?” I was speaking to a police officer that was sitting in the shade of a tree at the bottom of a hill such that a car cresting the hill would be nailed without the first hint of the presence of cops. Low hanging fruit if you’re a cop. “Why 80?” “Because the coefficient of friction on the road is too high at 120 and the road will be eaten away!”

WTF??? “The co-effi…..WHAT!? What about the trucks that sped past me and are twenty times as heavy?” “We can’t stop them. They just go on by.” “Sigh….How much?” By now I was hearing that voice that surprisingly sounds like Lynne stating “just be nice”. Nice? Jeez I hate nice when I’m being shaken down. “P500”. I get the ticket and asked where I should pay. They say “at the nearest police station.” The ticket is now in various pieces all over the landscape.

I drove out to Bokspitts, at the aforementioned corner of Botswana, through a river valley of chalk escarpments and limestone cliffs; truly beautiful and at once amazing that Tsabong served such a distant population. Bokspitts and Middlepits are old Afrikaner settlements dating back to before Botswana was “Botswana”. The journey was extraordinary in that I slowly became aware of the subtle changes I was seeing in the surrounding landscape. “Magnificent desolation”, I think is how it has been coined.

That night I stayed at a local hotel in Tsabong staffed by a UB grad who was interested in the hotel management industry, a true entrepreneur in the making and one of the very few that have independent market driven business ideals here. I was the only one at the hotel and fell asleep to the sounds of the Soweto Gospel Choir.