Southern Africa

For most people who come to Africa as visitors, southern Africa is where they first meet the Nile crocodile in the flesh, from the bench of a safari boat or the low seat of a mokoro sliding through the reeds. It is crocodile country of the picture-book kind: clear channels, sandbars, papyrus, the long dark shape hauled out to bask. Postcard water. But the same water that carries the tourists is home, larder and washing place to the people who live on it, and the two worlds meet along a single shoreline that runs from an inland delta in the sands of the Kalahari all the way to the edge of the Indian Ocean.