Journey to Central Kalahari Game Reserve

“I don’t really know when we decided to go to Africa. In a way, I guess each of us had always wanted to go. For as long as we can remember we have sought out wild places, drawn strength, peace and solitude from them and wanted to protect them from destruction. For myself, I can still recall the sadness and bewilderment I felt as a young boy, when from the top of the windmill, I watched a line of bulldozers plough through the woods on our Ohio farm, destroying it for a superhighway – and changing my life.”

These words are written by Mark Owens in the prologue to the book Cry of the Kalahari, co-authored with his wife Delia. As young wildlife biologists from the USA, the Owens moved to Botswana to spend the better part of seven years living in Central Kalahari Game Reserve, from 1974 to 1980.

This beautifully-written text describes the couple’s lives based at Deception Pan in the reserve, where they conducted research on lions and brown hyenas. It’s probably one of the best – and bravest – books I’ve read on African natural history and conservation. (Except for one thing, about which I’ll touch on later: it makes scant mention of the Bushmen’s history and their claim to this part of Botswana.)

My younger sister gave Cry of the Kalahari to my mother for Christmas in 1994. I’ve read it several times, most recently in the Central Kalahari itself.

At end of January 2020, I travelled there for two weeks with my friends Ian and Joni. We camped at the campsites of Kori, Letiahau, Piper’s Pan, Phokoje, Passarge and Lengau, each of them small, basic campsites in the dappled shade of a camelthorn tree or two. A long-drop loo and bucket shower are the only facilities.

Mark’s quote speaks to my own calling to be immersed in Africa’s wild nature, and to my depression when I see, hear or read of the destruction of natural, wild lands and oceans anywhere.

In Africa today, where much wilderness has been destroyed, compromised or commercialised, the Central Kalahari is valuable beyond any measure.

Located in the middle of Botswana, the CKGR is wonderfully big: 52 000 square kilometres, or 10% of the country’s surface area. (The second largest protected area in Africa, more than twice the size of Kruger National Park in South Africa.)

The reserve represents something increasingly special: an African wilderness that through sheer size remains mostly aloof and inaccessible, and exists on its own terms, without need to justify its existence to man (for now).

The massive landscape here has mostly eluded – thus far – the heavy hand of humans, and carries on with it’s daily business much the same as it has for thousands of years. (Except for the Gope/Ghaghoo diamond mine in the south-east of the reserve, near the small town of Lephephe, which I’ll get to later on…).

The CKGR ecosystem can look after itself and its animals without the need for interference from government, scientists or park rangers. In Southern and East Africa today, this is a very rare thing indeed, and it deserves to remain that way, if only so we can say, “yes, that place belongs to the Earth, not us.” We may never even go there, but just to know that it is still there…that keeps my soul alive.

The geology of the place makes it inaccessible to most. The reserve is covered with thick Kalahari sand, laid down over the past 100 million years by ancient rivers that dumped immense amounts of sediment into the interior of a continent that eventually became Africa. (Way back then, when dinosaurs roamed, Gondwana land was slowly starting to split up into the various continents we know today).

During previous climatic era, when the proto-Zambezi, Chobe and Kwando rivers flowed south (instead of east as they do today), much of the Central Kalahari area was a huge lake, with shallow rivers meandering through the sands. As the climate cooled and dried, a concomitant tilt in the continental plate shifted the directions of these massive rivers, diverting their water east, into the modern-day Zambezi River.

(It’s a little known fact that this part of Botswana is at the very southern end of the Great Rift Valley, and is subjected to regular earthquakes, some as much as 6 on the Richter scale. But because the cushioning effcts of the deep sands – up to 300 metres in places – the tremors are hardly felt).

The landscapes bears the clues of this once lush era. The Makgadikgadi Pans – a fossil remnant of one of the largest lakes in Africa – lies just a hundred kilometres east. In the CKGR itself, there are several ancient dry riverbeds linking a series of much smaller fossil lakes, known as “pans”. These flat, open expanses are dotted through the reserve, and most of the campsites are located adjacent or near to them.

A limited network of 4×4 jeep tracks make their way through the sand, following the ancient river beds and pans. Campsites are simple, nothing more than a long-drop loo and bucket for showers. Many of them are exclusive, allowing no more than one group of people.

You must have a fully-equipped 4×4 with everything you need for the length of your stay, including drinking water. You’re often all alone in the middle of nowhere (but if you’re prepared, that’s a very good thing, right?)

There are no water taps at the campsites, and although the pans sometimes carry water after heavy rains, it may not be drinkable. A solar-powered borehole at Piper’s Pan provides drinking water for animals, and is clean enough to use for an impromptu bucket shower.

Strictly speaking, the Kalahari as a geological system refers to a particular type of wind-blown (or aeolian) sand. And the Kalahari is one the biggest sand systems on Earth. In the south it starts in the northern Cape of South Africa, and extends through Namibia, Botswana, Zambia, Angola, DRC, Republic of Congo and into Gabon!

(Remarkably, when I visited Odzala National Park in the Republic of Congo a few years ago, I noticed how the sand in the rainforest felt exactly the same as the stuff all the way south in Botswana.)

The rainfall and temperatures are what determines the amount of life above the sand. In the Congo, almost two metres of rain falls every year, and the rainforests thrive in the sandy soils, which are enriched by huge amounts of leaf litter. In the south-western reaches of the Kalahari in South Africa and Botswana, as little as 50mm of rain can fall every year.  It is in these parts that the term “Kalahari Desert” is most often applied.

The Central Kalahari Game Reserve lies towards the southern end of the Kalahari sand deposits, but the rainfall can still reach over 400 mm per year, although much of it is highly variable and unreliable, falling as scattered showers.

As a result, this part of the Kalahari supports arid-adapted vegetation, like acacia shrub thickets and seasonal, ephemeral grasses. Big camel thorn trees, with tap roots up to 70 metres deep, suck up ground water from aquifers below ancient river beds.

(In this part of the Kalahari groundwater is believed to be extensive, although increasing numbers of boreholes – mostly for livestock – are reducing groundwater levels apparently).

It was the summer thunderstorm season when we travelled to CKGR. Hot afternoons generate massive cumulonimbus clouds, and by 3pm, it’s too hot to do anything except sit or lie in the shade of a camelthorn, with wet towel on your body, and pray for rain.

If the Kalahari gods choose to listen to your prayers, then the land is drenched with “pula” – rain. When we were there at end of January, the rain had a particular ephemeral, fleeting quality, often seeming to evaporate before it had even reached the ground.

Other times, heavy rains smashed into the dry Earth in an orgasmic release, the sky and land in passionate intercourse. The smell of wetness on dry, hard earth is more than just a meteorological event. It’s a deeply sensory experience that gives life to body, mind and soul.

Such is the reverence for fresh water in the semi-arid country that both Botswana’s currency and national motto is simply “pula“. Pula means more than just rain, however. The word implies life, luck and prosperity.

In a country where evaporation rates are double or even triple the average rainfall of 350mm, and summer temperatures can reach 45 degrees Celsius, fresh water is deeply entrenched into the subconscious of the local people.

Most of the campsites are located on the edge of the pans, whose clay soils hold more nutrients than the immense sandscapes that dominate the reserve. When the scattered rains fall, usually from December to April, sweet, nutritious grasses sprout from the pans and their edges.

Herds of springbok, wildebeest, zebra and even giraffe congregate to build up fat reserves for the inevitable dry winters that will arrive around May and last until December. Many of these herbivores are sedentary, but many also come from other parts of Botswana, guided to the green grass by an uncanny sixth sense.

Because there is no permanent surface water in the Central Kalahari, you won’t find Cape buffalo (which need to drink daily), or hippos of course. For several decades up until the 1990s, during which elephant populations were hammered by poachers and hunters, few elephants left the north of the country to venture  this far south in the Kalahari.

But recently in good rainy years, when standing water accumulates on the pans for several weeks, more and more elephant bulls are moving into the reserve from the north. The solar-powered borehole at Piper’s Pan also supplies some semi-permanent water. (Read my blog about the elephants moving into Makgadikgadi Pans here).

As readers of Cry of the Kalahari will know, until the 1970s, the migrations of the Kalahari’s herbivores – particularly wildebeest – numbered into their millions, and probably were bigger and longer than the current Serengeti migration in East Africa.

Begining in the 1950s and lasting until the 1980s, the government built several hundred kilometres of veterinary fences across the middle of the country, separating the central Kalahari region from the north and east. Beef is a big industry in Botswana, and the fences were erected on the insistence of European countries who refused to import the country’s beef unless the fences were built.

To this day, the fences remain, even though there is no scientific proof that the fences stop the spread of the virus, or in fact that wild herbivores even spread the disease.

The fences wiped out the wildebeest and zebra migration of the Kalahari, stopping the herbivores from moving north in the dry winters from the central Kalahari to the Boteti River and Lake Ngami and Lake Xau. It’s estimated that in 1961 and again in 1964, as many as 80 000 wildebeest died at the corner of the Kuki-Makalamabedi fence corner in the north-east of the reserve.

The fences effectively trapped the herbivores in the reserve, whose only water source is rainfall that collects on the pans. Within a few weeks or even just days, the water evaporates, and in dry season, the animals have to move north and east to drink from the Boteti River and the lakes.

The current numbers of wildebeest and zebra in particular are much reduced.  On Mark and Delia Owens’ first morning at Deception Pan in May 1974, they woke up to a single herd of over 3 000 springbok. According to George Silberbauer, “great mixed herds of gemsbok, eland, and hartebeest, covering an area three by five miles near Pipers Pans have been reduced to a small fraction of their former wet-season concentrations.”

When we camped at Pipers Pans, during middle of the January rainy season, there were no more than a few hundred springbok, and a handful of gemsbok and wildebeest. At Deception Pan, there were probably a hundred springbok. In seven years at Deception Pan, the Owens never saw a zebra, even though they had been known previously to congregate there during the wet season. It’s clear that the CKGR was once home to far more herbivores.

However, in the past ten years, with damage and disrepair of the vet fences (some caused by the resurgence of elephants into the area), the herds are slowly rebuilding themselves, and the migratory routes seem to be making a comeback. There is good work being done by Botswana to help restore the migrations to some semblance of its former glory – read my blog on the topic here.

And there are still enough sedentary springbok, gemsbok and wildebeest to keep the Kalahari’s territorial predators happy.

According to 2004 research by Paul Funston and others, the CKGR has a lion populations of between 150 and 450 (depending on season). The prides may not be as big as in East Africa, but they are still apparently healthy, suffering none of the diseases like TB or feline HIV that lions in parks like Kruger have to endure (due to their proximity to communities, infected cattle and buffalo).

The lions strut around like they own the place, and sometimes wander through your camp without invitation (of course). Be careful at night, especially when going for a pee.

Leopard and cheetah populations are probably also healthy for a reserve of this size. (Though I haven’t found any up-to-date research on these species in CKGR).

The reserve is probably one of the best places in Africa to see shy, nocturnal species like brown hyena and aardwolf (we saw the latter, but not the former, although there were fresh hyena tracks all over the place.)

The black-backed jackals are the spies of the Kalahari…just when you think you’re all alone, one of them pops its head up and trots past. Their yapping howls at sunset and sunrise are a key part of the Kalahari’s soundtrack, along with the boom-boom-boom of the Kori bustard and the raucous clacking of the northern black-korhaan (which we soon started calling the Kalahari chicken). Lion roars provide the bass notes, and the rufous-naped larks sing the melodies.

The Owens’ book made the Central Kalahari famous long before it was on the tourist map – indeed, long before tourists were even allowed into the reserve. For several decades, visitors had to apply for a permit, which was only issued under strict conditions.

Proclaimed in 1961, the Central Kalahari Game Reserve should have been called Central Kalahari Bushmen Reserve. It was officially intended as a refuge for Botswana’s bushmen, the most ancient lineage of human beings, and the most genetically-diverse people on Earth today. According to Mike Main’s book Kalahari, initially up to 3 000 Bushmen lived in the reserve, but during dry years, many of these nomadic hunter gatherers would leave, some returning again when rainfall returned (hunters and gatherers are supposed to do that, of course).

For 200 000 years, the Bushmen have been living in Southern Africa, and in the Kalahari (read a BBC article here). But since the arrival of Bantu tribes from central Africa about 2 500 years ago, and European colonials in the 1500s, the Bushmen people have been pushed off their land, marginalised and in many cases, systematically exterminated and murdered. (James Suzman’s book Affluence without Abundance is also additional required reading for any visitor to the Kalahari.)

The Central Kalahari was one of the last places where they lived in a traditional way. But with the discovery of diamonds in Central Kalahari in the 1980s (read an article from Ecologist here), the government has systematically moved them off one of their last pieces of ancestral lands that once stretched all across the immense sub-continent.

The first forced removals were in 1997, when Anglo American (owner of De Beers) began drilling in the south-east of the reserve near Gope. In 2002 and 2005, more Bushmen were evicted, and in 2006, the Bushmen won a case in the high court of Botswana. De Beers sold the deposit rights in 2007, to Gem Diamonds, because of public pressure. The mine was sold again in 2019, and diamonds from the mine are on sale around the world. The Bushmen have yet to be compensated, despite overwhelming rights to the land.

(It’s quite simple: the Bushmen are entitled to ownership of all of Southern Africa. Governments in Southern Africa – and colonial powers in Europe – still have much to answer for. There have been no formal apologies, fair compensations or meaningful land reparations to the Bushmen. It’s a haunting question that modern society have yet to answer properly.)

While the Central Kalahari Game Reserve remains a remarkable place to experience the rapidly dwindling wilderness atmosphere of Africa, I can’t forget that this magical place is haunted by the absence of one of it’s most important members: the Bushmen people.