George Silberbauer is the kind of anthropologist who can tell you everything about rainbows. In a recent email, my Botswana-based cousin Dave, whose wife Ginny is a Tswana chief’s granddaughter, wondered just what a rainbow actually was: the rains had come and the country was full of them.
Silberbauer’s reply was typical. Here’s an extract, edited perforce to remove some lovely forays into the science of rainbows and their faint sisters, moonbows, together with remarks on rainbows in Greek mythology and the Talmud:
Big nostalgia pang there. Bots stole my heart long ago, but it’s a wicked thief when it rains. All that dust and yellow-brown dry turns into lush green and flowers of astonishing variety and the thunderstorms are monumental.
Rainbows are to be respected. As you good convent girls all know, after the Flood, God said to Noah, ‘This is the token of the covenant I made between me and you and every living creature that is with you.’
Ginny will remind him that the Tswana name is ‘pestle-of-the-gods’ (a pestle is a big deal—every good wife spends a large part of her day grinding maize to make pap, or sorghum to make beer), or ‘space/place-of-the-gods’, depending on which part of the country you come from. In Zulu rainbows are less substantial, only ‘withies-of-the-queen/goddess’, but also translatable as ‘fragrance of the queen, or goddess’.
Ask a bloody academic a question and he goes on forever but, as a fellow-teacher, David will appreciate that it would all have been so much simpler were there a blackboard and chalk available. Just as well he didn’t ask about other refractive phenomena like haloes around the sun and moon. They’re really tricky and we would be here until the crack of doom.
Please pass on my warmest Dumel-Ditumelo-ka-thato (greetings with love) to them.
Silberbauer’s love of all Botswana is patent: when his eldest daughter was christened in Melbourne, her middle name was a Kalahari Bushman one: /xade. (The slash indicates one of the many click-sounds in Bushman languages.) The vicar received careful coaching in click-pronunciation, but on the day his false teeth were unequal to the task and shot into the font. But it would be hard to match Silberbauer’s linguistic abilities: watching him talk to Ginny (who was visiting us in Melbourne in January with Dave) in perfect, courtly Setswana was a revelation.
Silberbauer’s CV includes several degrees, many publications and