I Taught the Limpopo From a Laminated Map for Twenty-Two Years

The Map on the Back Wall

For twenty-two years there was a map of southern Africa on the back wall of Room G14. It was laminated, which mattered, because every September I traced the Limpopo River across it in green whiteboard marker and every July I wiped it off again. By the end the plastic had a faint permanent green ghost where the river ran, as if the map itself had learned the lesson better than most of my Year Nines.

I taught at a comprehensive in south Leeds. Rivers were my favourite unit. I liked explaining meanders and oxbow lakes, and I liked that the Limpopo was the river in the Kipling story, the great grey green greasy one, because a few of the quieter children had heard it read aloud at primary school and it gave them something to hold on to. I would point at the spot where Botswana, South Africa and Zimbabwe meet and say, this is a confluence of countries as well as rivers. Then I would ask who could spell Shashe. Nobody ever could. I am not certain I could either, the first few years.

I had never been. That was the quiet embarrassment underneath it all. I had been to the Lake District with the Duke of Edinburgh groups more times than I can count, and to Malham Cove so often that the farmer by the stile used to wave. But the river I loved teaching most was a line of marker on plastic.

The Last Day, and a Card

When I retired in the summer of last year, the department gave me a card and a bottle of wine, which was lovely. The thing that undid me was smaller. A former pupil, now a teacher herself in Bradford, had heard I was leaving and posted a photograph through the school office. It was a picture of the old map, taken on her phone in about 2011, with a girl's hand in the corner pointing at the green line. Underneath she had written: you said you would go one day, miss.

I had said that. I said it every year. It was a line, the sort of thing teachers say to make a place feel real. I sat in my car in the staff car park, under the sycamore that drops sap on everyone's windscreen, and felt like a fraud.

My husband, Graham, is a practical man. When I showed him the card he did not say anything sentimental. He went into the spare room, came back with the atlas I had used to plan lessons in the nineties, and opened it to the right page. Then he said, well, it is not going to come to us.

Planning a Trip Like a Lesson

I planned it the only way I know how, which is like a scheme of work. I had a ring binder. I had colour coding. I had a list of learning objectives, which Graham found hilarious and which I still think were sensible: see where the rivers meet, see the land in the dry season, and stop pretending.

Most of the reading I did was about the eastern edge of the country, the Tuli area, where the land is all red sandstone and mopane and those enormous baobabs that look as if they were planted upside down. I had shown photographs of exactly that landscape to my classes. I had never once thought of it as somewhere a retired woman from Morley with a dodgy left knee could actually go.

There was a lot of advice online, much of it contradictory. Some people swore by self driving, some by fly in camps. I read reviews late at night with a cup of tea going cold beside me. In the end we chose somewhere close to the confluence for the plain reason that I wanted to stand where the green line had been. When I typed Botswana safari into the search bar for the first time, I remember half laughing at myself, because it felt like the sort of phrase a much braver person would type.

The Smell of Dry Land

The first thing nobody tells you is the smell. Dust, warm stone, something sweet and herby when the vehicle brushed past certain bushes. The second thing nobody tells you is how loud the quiet is. In Leeds there is always a bus, always a car alarm somewhere towards Beeston. Out there, in the late afternoon, I could hear a beetle walk across a leaf.

Our guide was a softly spoken man called Kabelo, who had grown up not far away. On the first drive I asked far too many questions, the teacher in me unable to stop, and he answered every one with patience. He showed me how to read elephant tracks, which way the toes pointed, how fresh the dung was by pressing it with a stick. He told me the riverbeds I was looking at, dry and wide and pale, become something else entirely in the rains. I nodded and thought of every child I had told that rivers are always moving. Here was one standing completely still, waiting.

We stayed at a Botswana safari lodge in the Tuli area, and what I remember about the room is not the room. It is lying awake the first night listening to something large breathing near the fence, and Graham whispering, is that a lion, and me whispering back, I have absolutely no idea, I only taught the theory.

Standing at the Confluence

On the third morning Kabelo drove us out towards where the Shashe meets the Limpopo. I had imagined this moment so often that I was afraid it would be small. Places you have built up in your head usually are.

It was not small. The riverbed was a wide sweep of sand with a thin thread of water still moving through one side of it, and on the far bank there were huge trees, nyala berry and fever trees, their yellow bark glowing in the early light. Three countries were in view. A troop of baboons was arguing on a rock. An elephant, alone, walked down the bank and across the sand as if the border was something humans had imagined, which of course it is.

I cried. Not prettily. Graham passed me a tissue he had clearly packed for this exact purpose, which told me he had known all along.

Kabelo asked, gently, why this spot. I told him about the laminated map, the green marker, the girl in Bradford. He was quiet for a moment and then he said his own geography teacher had drawn the River Thames on a blackboard, and he had never seen that either. We laughed about that for a long time. Two people who had each been taught the other one's river.

What I Brought Back

I am not someone who writes travel reviews and I am not going to start. I will say that before we went, I had read a fair amount comparing different Botswana lodges, and almost none of it described what actually mattered to me, which was the moment the place stopped being a lesson and started being somewhere.

When I got home I printed one photograph, the empty riverbed with the lone elephant halfway across, and posted it to my former pupil in Bradford. On the back I wrote: you were right to remind me. I did go. Now draw it in green for your own lot.

She emailed a week later. She has a laminated map on her classroom wall too. She says hers has a green ghost line now as well, and that when she tells the children she has been, she means someone she knows has been, which she says counts.

I have retired from teaching. I have not retired from geography. Next year Graham wants to see the Mekong. I have already bought a ring binder.