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Mercury, July/August 2005 Table of Contents

Courtesy of D. de Vries

by Dan De Vries

After responding to an advertisement for a physics faculty position in the Chronicle of Higher Education and subsequently being recruited, I left for the University of Botswana under a contract that included round-trip airplane tickets for my family, private schooling in Africa for my children, and a generous bonus upon successful completion of my contract. It seemed like a once in a lifetime opportunity: I was going to be paid to do geophysics, my specialty within physics, in a country whose whole economic development was tied to physics, and I was going to be able to live in an exotic culture I had only read about in magazines.

Botswana is in southern Africa. It is the northern neighbor of the Republic of South Africa, the wealthiest country in the region and the former home of apartheid, the iniquitous political system. Botswana used to be part of the British Empire, so one of its two official languages is English (the other is Setswana, a Bantu group language). The land is dominated by the famous Kalahari desert, in which daytime temperatures can soar to 120 degrees and where only the most adaptable living beings (e.g., the famous Bushmen, more properly known as the San tribe) can survive from season to season. Consequently, population density in the country is very low. Although Botswana is about the size of Texas (my current home), there is only one Botswanan for every dozen Texans. One of the clearest signs of Botswana’s sparse population is the fact that the local telephone company publishes one phone book for the entire country, and they manage to include in it a section of yellow pages!

The highly uninhabited region is also a boon to astronomy. The lack of ambient light and human noise, in all its forms, makes Botswana an excellent venue for telescopic research.

In this brief essay, I will discuss the changing economic forces in Botswana and the central role that physics plays in this transformation, the emerging University system, and the pedagogical adaptations that a physics professor must make to teach effectively the pupils of the Kalahari.

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