In 1980, fresh from university, I arrived in Botswana with my husband and moved onto a farm in the remotest stretch of the Ghanzi region. In those days, reaching the nearest tar road meant a good two days of driving through foot-deep sand, and that was if you didn’t break down. Which you usually did.
The farm workers were San, BaSarwa, the original hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari. In 1980 they still spent a significant portion of their lives living in the central Kalahari in the way their ancestors had lived for over a hundred thousand years; reading the land, tracking animals across sand that told them everything, gathering food from a desert that looked empty to my untrained eyes and was in fact full. They were, without question, among the most joyful people I have ever met. Not joyful in spite of hardship. Joyful in a way that hardship could not reach, a quality of mirth so infectious and so deep that it seemed to come from somewhere below ordinary happiness entirely.
I have only ever encountered that same quality in one other culture. Tibetans carry it too: that particular laughter, that lightness in the face of suffering, that capacity to find the comedy in catastrophe without dismissing the catastrophe. It has always struck me as more than coincidence that both the San and the Tibetans are peoples who have lived in extraordinarily close relationship with the earth, in harsh and demanding landscapes, guided by wisdom traditions that understand consciousness to be far larger than the individual self.
Decades later, I found myself driving through Botswana in the company of the man who had done more than anyone to protect the most sacred site in the country. We were on a journey, carrying with us Tibetan peace vases to plant in African sacred ground. There, in that dusty vehicle, something in me recognised the shape of it. This was not a coincidence either. This was a pattern the earth had been quietly weaving for a very long time.
What the Vases Carried
I had been entrusted with an unusual task: to serve as custodian for the planting of peace vases across Africa. In Vajrayana Buddhist tradition these vessels are known as ter-bum. Each one was filled with finely ground precious stones mixed with seawater, sealed, and consecrated in 1991 in Bhutan over two weeks of gathered prayer. The principal consecrator was His Holiness Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, a master of such extraordinary stature that he was revered and sought out across all four schools of Tibetan Buddhism, teaching lamas of every lineage including His Holiness the Dalai Lama himself. Khyentse Rinpoche passed away shortly after the consecration was complete.
Six thousand two hundred vases were sent out into the world.
They were to be placed in sacred sites, in major water bodies, in ecologically endangered places, in every country on earth, each one carrying a single unwavering intention: the benefit of all living beings.
In the late nineties, for a period of about ten not very productive years, I was the custodian of the African vases.
It was not a simple assignment. Africa has very little relationship with Tibetan Buddhism. Borders were suspicious of sealed vessels with unknown contents. Explanations were met with blank stares. There were moments of genuine absurdity, standing at a border crossing trying to account for what I was carrying to someone who had no frame of reference for it whatsoever. But the vases somehow took care of themselves at these times as I had been given something consecrated by one of the greatest spiritual masters of the twentieth century. He and his fellow lamas had the sincere aspiration that it would bring benefit to the earth and all who live on it.
It was worth taking seriously.
The Company I Kept
For the Botswana leg of the journey I was joined by a small group of friends and fellow travellers, among them Nomsa, Linda who was raising her children off-grid in the Tuli Block, her sister-in-law Christine, and Alec Campbell with his wife Judy and their son Niall.
Alec Campbell was one of the most significant figures in Botswana’s cultural and archaeological history, though you would never have known it from his manner. He was a quiet, deeply humble man with the particular stillness of someone who has spent decades listening more than speaking. He had published nearly a hundred articles, books, and reports on Botswana: its archaeology, its history, its environment, its people. He had served as the founding Director of the National Museum. He had been instrumental in having the Tsodilo Hills declared a National Monument and then recognised as Botswana’s first UNESCO World Heritage Site, and had co-edited the definitive scholarly work on the site. He had spent more than five decades in personal relationship with the San and Hambukushu communities who lived there. He knew those hills the way you know the face of someone you have loved across a lifetime.
His son Niall’s connection to Tsodilo ran even deeper in its own way. At twelve years old, Niall had been brought to the hills by his father because unexplainable things were happening to him: petit mal seizures, visitations by spirits. The San healers at Tsodilo danced and divined his calling. He went on to train under traditional healers across Southern Africa and eventually returned to the hills to be initiated as a medium for the nature spirits that inhabit their caves and rock faces, spirits that manifest as predatory animals and hold an essential role in the traditional understanding of the boundary between the human and natural worlds. Niall Campbell is now a nyanga, a traditional doctor, and a Ngaka ua diKoma, a Doctor of the Law, widely regarded as one of the foremost living practitioners of Southern African ancestral wisdom. He carries his father’s rigour and the hills’ own mark.
These were the people I was travelling with as we moved through Botswana, placing vases in the earth.
The Mountains of the Gods
In the remote northwest, four quartzite hills rise without warning from the flat Kalahari scrubland, as if placed there deliberately. In the understanding of the San, who have lived in relationship with this landscape for over a hundred thousand years, that is precisely what happened.
The San call this place Tsodilo. The four hills form a family: Male, Female, Child, and Grandchild. The Male Hill is the tallest, and on its summit lies the most sacred ground in all of Tsodilo: deep impressions in the rock, understood by the San to mark the place where the first spirit knelt after creating the earth. The Female Hill is broader, covering the greatest area, and within her the spirits of the dead are believed to rest and watch over the living. Most of the ancient paintings are found near her.
Those paintings! Some 4,500 of them, spanning ten kilometres of rock face, reaching back 20,000 years. Animals rendered with astonishing delicacy, human figures in ceremony and motion, symbols the San carried in living memory until colonial disruption fractured but could not fully erase that transmission. A library in ochre and time, kept by people whose descendants still laugh the way our farm workers laughed in 1980, from somewhere below the reach of ordinary suffering. And Alec there as our guide, not explaining what the paintings meant, he was too humble to assume such knowledge, but guiding us to feel into the potential meaning of them.
Climb the Female Hill and you find something no map prepares you for. Inside the hollow of the hill, cradled as if within a body, is an entire microclimate. Moisture gathers here that the surrounding Kalahari does not know. Green things grow in the crevices. Butterflies move through dappled shade. The air is different: cooler, denser, quietly alive in a way that makes you stop walking and simply stand there, breathing it in.
What Happened When We Planted the Vase
We placed the peace vase in the earth at the foot of the large male hill at Tsodilo. It felt right in the way that few things do, completely unforced, as though the ground was expecting it. Alec’s five decades of relationship with the place, Niall’s initiatory bond with its spirits, the aspiration of a great Tibetan master encoded in a small sealed vessel: these were not foreign things being imposed on African soil. They were different expressions of the same knowing. That the earth is alive and responsive. That intention is real. That sincerity is met with something.
We offered what we had.
Niall and I remained behind to offer thanks to the mountain. And then we walked back toward camp in the particular silence that follows something that has gone well.
We rounded a corner of the sand track and there was a python, crossing directly in front of us. Spanning the road from one side to the other. Large, slow, entirely deliberate. We both stopped and knelt a few feet from it without discussion, the way you do before something that carries that quality of presence. It did not alter its course.
Niall told me afterwards, quietly and with complete certainty, that this was the highest accolade the ancestors could offer. They were pleased. The vase had been received.
I have spent enough years at thresholds like this one to know better than to disagree with a python.
The Thread That Runs Through
What strikes me most, looking back across that journey and across the forty-odd years I have spent in relationship with this country and its people, is how consistent the thread is. The San farm workers in Ghanzi in 1980 laughing in the deep sand. The Tibetan lamas in Bhutan in 1991 consecrating vessels with two weeks of prayer and then sending them to the edges of the world. Alec Campbell spending five decades in quiet devotion to a set of hills most of the world had never heard of. Niall kneeling as a twelve-year-old boy while healers divined what the spirits already knew about him.
All of it pointing toward the same understanding: that the earth is not a backdrop to human life. It is a participant. It has its own intelligence, its own memory, its own ways of communicating with those who are still enough to listen. Indigenous knowledge, in every culture that has genuinely preserved it, is fundamentally knowledge of that relationship. How to tend it. How to approach it with the right quality of attention. How to receive what it offers without grasping, and offer back without performing.
This is what I try to hold open on soul safaris in Botswana. Not a spiritual performance in the bush, but a genuine slowing down into the older rhythm that is already here, waiting, in the sand and the silence and the extraordinary painted walls of the Female Hill at Tsodilo.
Alec Campbell is gone now. I am glad I knew him. I am glad I was there when the python crossed the road.
The vase is still in the earth.
To learn more about Tsodilo Hills, Botswana visit our destinations page.
