I didn't know until this week that seswaa is basically beef and salt and patience and nothing else. Brisket or shin in a three-legged pot over coals, water, salt, hours — then you pound it with a wooden stick until the meat gives up and falls into threads. No onion. No pepper. People will tell you off for adding anything. Bogobe alongside, sorghum cooked soft, and you eat with your hand.
So picture the fires. 1966, Bechuanaland becomes Botswana at midnight, Seretse Khama president, and a country of cattle and barely any tarred road lights up in pots that all take the same six hours. Everybody's arm aching by morning. There's a photograph of the signing, him bending over the table in a dark suit and glasses, two microphones in front of him, and somebody behind in a wig and robes. Anyway — I've burnt shin doing it faster. You can't do it faster.
The flag went up that same midnight in 1966, and it was chosen with some care: black and white bands together for the people living side by side, and blue for rain — pula, which is also the greeting and later the currency. Not a colour you'd expect from a country that dry, which was rather the point.
Cattle country in that part of the world runs on a strange clock, Rosa — the Okavango flood turns up months after the rain that made it, having walked down from the Angolan highlands. Herders shift the animals on the water's timetable, not the sky's. Six hours in the pot seems brisk by comparison.