The sound of a distant song – 10/11/2023 – Zeca Camargo

It was our group’s farewell night at that hotel on one of the most beautiful banks of the Okavango Delta, in Botswana, and the hotel staff prepared a surprise for us. For them, probably a routine.

After dessert, there was a movement of tables and chairs, in that large social space, whose absence of walls allowed us to feel even closer to that pristine nature. And soon the same people who had just served our dinner came in singing.

As I already mentioned, what seemed like a gift to us was just a Tuesday for them. However, the energy of what was presented to us stopped infecting us. And between feet that tapped vigorously on the floor and smiles too wide to fit on those beautiful faces, what struck me most was a certain song.

The entire repertoire had half a dozen of them, but only one with an immediately seductive chorus that reached our ears, in English, with a strong local accent: “Biuuultifol Botswana”. Beautiful Botswana, the lyrics said, an almost unnecessary statement given everything we had seen in the last few days. However, set in an unforgettable melody.

If I close my eyes now I can hear it clearly again. As well as hearing the echoes of the claps beating loudly and the occasional female howls permeating the song like a seam between its end and its beginning, making it infinite.

Jubilation was the word that came to me to describe what we saw. It wasn’t just about beauty, but it wasn’t exactly a celebration either. It was more of an inspiration, summarizing our experiences in that region and proposing that the world look at those people more with affection.

Unfortunately, this is precisely something that seems to be missing in the world recently. When I sat down to start this column today, last Saturday morning, even before typing the first line, I was informed of the atrocities that had just happened in Israel carried out by Hamas, which controls the Palestinian territory.

I then moved away from the keyboard and got further away from it as I read more about the conflict. Everything seemed to irreversibly distance me from the beautiful things I wanted to write about.

Three whole days passed until the “deadline”, the deadline for submitting a text to be published, something that always tortures us, journalists and chroniclers, finally decreed that I finish what I hadn’t even started.

Reluctantly I insisted on the experiences in Botswana, trying to make that song erase the horror of the news coming from the Middle East. And for a few minutes, the ones it took me to construct the first six paragraphs, I managed to unlock my thinking.

But finally the tragedy, in this column today, overcame the grace of what I wanted to share with you. My thoughts, like yours, turned once again to the lives lost in this new war and to the fragility of our balance on this Earth.

I have already told you about my visits to Israel. I reported the strength of faith, the richness of culture, the truth of the people who live in this divided region. But none of these records help me now to look at these attacks with hope.

Trying to escape, I sought comfort once again in words and it occurred to me that intolerance, the hallmark of these Hamas attacks, rhymes with ignorance. So I started looking for something that rhymed with this topic I set out to write about this week: Botswana.

Vain search so far, but I haven’t given up yet. Who knows, maybe in the next column.

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