Here is a brief selection of favorite, new and hard-to-find books, prepared for your journey. You will find below direct links to Amazon where you will be able to purchase the following recommended books in your preferred format.
Travel & Field Guides
Botswana Safari Guide
This is the sole guide to focus on Botswana’s key safari locations: the Okavango Delta, Chobe National Park and the Northern Kalahari. The Okavango Delta’s permanent waters attract year- round wildlife, including all the ‘big five’. Outside the Delta, this country offers tremendous variety in landscapes, from the arid Kalahari to lush forests. Riverine areas harbour spectacular herds of elephants and buffalo, as well as mighty predator populations.
Birds of Botswana
Covering all 597 species recorded to date, Birds of Botswana features more than 1,200 superb color illustrations, detailed species accounts, seasonality and breeding bars, and a color distribution map for each species. The book also highlights the best birding areas in Botswana, provides helpful tips on where and when to see key species, and depicts special races and morphs specific to Botswana. This is the first birding guide written by a Botswana-based ornithologist and the only one dedicated specifically to Botswana.
The Safari Companion: A Guide to Watching African Mammals
An invaluable encyclopedic guide to Africa’s mammals by a noted scientist, this perennial bestseller includes black-and- white drawings, an overview of each animal group and in-depth information. Written with a typical safari-goer in mind.
The Wildlife of Southern Africa
This new edition of the best- selling and well-known illustrated field guide to the animals and plants of southern Africa is fully updated with all the latest taxonomy and common names. It features over 2,000 carefully selected plants and animals, large and small, that are likely to be encountered during a visit to any part of the region. More than 1,200
species are vividly illustrated and many more are identifiable from the text through reference to similar species.
The Kingdon Pocket Guide to Africa Mammals
A conveniently compact edition of Kingdon’s celebrated guide that includes information on distribution, ecology and conservation status, with 480 outstanding color illustrations and maps. This is an essential guide for anyone with an interest in wildlife who visits Africa.
Botswana: The Essential Guide to Customs & Culture
Culture Smart! introduces you to the lives of the people. It looks at the history that has shaped the society and shows the importance of traditional customs and values for both travelers and businesspeople
alike. It describes how the Batswana live, work, and play, and how to avoid the pitfalls of cultural misunderstanding.
History / Autobiographies
Cry of the Kalahari
Carrying little more than a change of clothes and a pair of binoculars, two young Americans, Mark and Delia Owens, caught a plane to Africa, bought a thirdhand Land Rover, and drove deep into the Kalahari Desert. There they lived for seven years, in an unexplored area with no roads, no people, and no source of water for thousands of square miles. In this vast wilderness the Owenses began their zoology research, working along animals that had never before been exposed to humans.
A Marriage of Inconvenience: The Persecution of Ruth and Seretse Khama
In 1948, a young white English woman, Ruth Williams, made headline news all over the world. For she had met, fallen in love with, and married Seretse Khama, an African prince and heir to the chieftainship of a tribe of more than 100,000 people, the Bamangwato. At first, the marriage was no more welcome in Africa than in government circles in London. Within a year of their wedding, the young couple had provoked an astonishing series of events that had never been explained.
Twenty Chickens for a Saddle: The Story of an African Childhood
When Robyn Scott ‘s parents decide to uproot their young family from
New Zealand and move to a converted cowshed in rural Botswana, life for six-year-old Robyn changed forever. In this wild and new landscape excitement can be found around every corner, and with each misadventure she and her family learn more about the quirks, charms, and challenges of living in one of Africa’s most remarkable and beautiful countries as it stands on the brink of an epidemic.
The Lost World of the Kalahari
An account of the author’s grueling, but ultimately successful, journey in 1957, through Africa’s remote, primitive Kalahari Desert, in search of the legendary Bushmen, the hunters who pray to the great hunters in the sky.
Whatever You Do, Don’t Run: True Tales of a Botswana Safari Guide
With biting wit and tales of outrageous adventure, Peter Allison gives us a safari guide’s first-hand account of working in the African bush. Allison regales us with stories about confronting the world’s fiercest terrain of wild animals and, most terrifying of all, managing herds of gaping tourists run amok. His humor is exceeded only by his love and respect for the animals of the Kalahari. As a top safari guide, he knows he serves the whims of his wealthy clients, yet he often has to stop the impulse to run as far away from them as he can.
Saturday is for Funerals
Unity Dow and Max Essex tell the true story of lives ravaged by
AIDS—of orphans, bereaved parents, and widows; of families who devote most Saturdays to the burial of relatives and friends. We witness the actions of community leaders, medical professionals, research scientists, and educators to see how an unprecedented epidemic of death and destruction is being stopped in its tracks. This book describes how a country responded in a time of crisis. In the true-life stories of loss and quiet heroism, activism and scientific initiatives, we learn of new techniques that dramatically reduce rates of transmission from mother to child, new therapies that can save lives of many infected with AIDS, and intricate knowledge about the spread of HIV, as well as issues of confidentiality, distributive justice, and human rights.
Literature
The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency
This first novel in Alexander McCall Smith’s widely acclaimed
The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series tells the story of the
delightfully cunning and enormously engaging Precious Ramotswe, who is drawn to her profession to “help people with problems in their lives.”
Immediately upon setting up shop in a small storefront in Gaborone, she is hired to track down a missing husband, uncover a con man, and follow a wayward daughter. But the case that tugs at her heart, and lands her in danger, is a missing eleven- year-old boy, who may have been snatched by witchdoctors.
Maru
A moving and magical tale of an orphaned girl, Margaret Cadmore,
who goes to teach in a remote village in Botswana where her own people are kept as slaves. Her presence polarizes a community that does not see her people as human, and condemns her to the lonely life of an outcast. In the love story and intrigue that follows Head brilliantly combines a portrait of loneliness with a rich affirmation of the mystery and spirituality of life. The core of this otherworldly, rhapsodic work is a plot about racial injustice and prejudice with a lesson in how traditional intolerance may render whole sections of a society untouchable.
White Dog Fell From The Sky
In apartheid South Africa in 1976, medical student Isaac Muthethe is forced to flee his country after witnessing a friend murdered by white members of the South African Defense Force. He is smuggled into Botswana, where he is hired as a gardener by a young American woman, Alice Mendelssohn, who has abandoned her Ph.D. studies to follow her husband to Africa. When Isaac goes missing and Alice goes searching for him, what she finds will change her life and inextricably bind her to this sunburned, beautiful land.
A Question of Power
This novel displays the complicated life of Elizabeth, whose reality is intermingled with nightmarish dreams and hallucinations. Like the author, Elizabeth was conceived out-of-wedlock; her mother was white and her father black a union outlawed in apartheid South Africa. Elizabeth eventually leaves with her young son to live in Botswana, a country less oppressed by colonial domination, where she finds stability for herself and her son by working on an experimental farm. As readers grow to know Elizabeth, they experience the inner chaos that threatens her stability, and her constant struggle to emerge from the torment of her dreams. There she is plagued by two men who represent complex notions of politics, sex, religion, individuality, and the blurred line between good and evil.
When Rain Clouds Gather
Inspired by her own traumatic life experiences as an outcast in Apartheid South African society and as a refugee living at the Bamangwato Development Association Farm in Botswana, Head’s tough and telling classic work is set in the poverty-stricken village of Golema Mmidi, a haven to exiles. A South African political refugee and an Englishman join forces to revolutionize the villagers’ traditional farming methods, but their task is fraught with hazards as the pressures of tradition, opposition from the local chief, and the unrelenting climate threaten to divide and devastate the fragile community.
