The history of Moremi

A hunting country under a chief's hand.

The land that became Moremi was BaTawana country, and its wildlife was a resource under the chief's authority long before anyone thought of protecting it. The BaTawana, a Tswana people, established themselves in Ngamiland in the late eighteenth century and made the eastern delta their cattle and hunting ground; Chief's Island, out in the wetland, was the royal hunting preserve, held for the chief and closed to others. Along the Khwai River and in the delta's channels lived the people who had been there longer: the Bugakhwe, a San people of the river woodland, and the BaYei, whose mokoro is the delta's own boat and whose fishing and reed-country skills the safari trade still leans on.

By the 1950s the balance had tipped. Hunting under licence and outside it, the Ngamiland cattle economy pressing into the delta's edge, and a protectorate administration with other priorities were thinning the game visibly, and the people who noticed first were the ones whose land it was. Two English residents of Maun, June and Robert Kay, argued the case for a reserve with the BaTawana leadership, and the case found its audience.

The reserve the BaTawana made, and the village that moved.

In 1963, at a kgotla — the BaTawana's public assembly, where the chief and the people decide together — in Maun, the BaTawana proclaimed the Moremi Game Reserve on their own tribal land: the first in Africa established by an African community rather than a colonial administration. The tribe was led at the time by Elizabeth Pulane Moremi, regent for her young son and widow of Chief Moremi III, and it was her authority and the kgotla's assent that made the proclamation. The reserve was named for the chief. It took in the Mopane Tongue and the country north to the Khwai River, and it was designated a game reserve rather than a national park, a distinction that mattered to the tribe: a reserve under their own authority, run at first not by the state but by the Fauna Conservation Society of Ngamiland, the body the Kays and the BaTawana formed for the purpose.

Part of that record is hard, and it is stated here plainly: the Bugakhwe village on the Khwai, inside the new boundary, was moved out with the reserve's creation, its people resettled on the river's northern bank at the place that is Khwai village today — per Maitseo Bolaane, the University of Botswana historian, in her book Chiefs, Hunters and San in the Creation of the Moremi Game Reserve. What was gained was the delta's core under protection at the moment hunting was emptying it; what it cost was a settled people's home, and the distrust that decision left runs, in places, to this day.

The reserve grew in the decades after, and each step was the tribe's or the state's decision rather than a colonial one. Chief's Island, which the proclamation had left out, was given up by the tribe and added in the 1970s; the state's parks department took over management at the end of that decade; and a strip of the north-western delta joined under a land-use plan in the early 1990s. What the BaTawana set aside in one afternoon became, over thirty years, close to a third of the delta.

Governed by the state, funded by the visitor.

Moremi is governed today by Botswana's Department of Wildlife and National Parks, under the same rules that run the country's national parks, and it is paid for by the people who come to see it. The model is the one Botswana chose for its wild country decades ago: few visitors, at a high price, on land that stays under wildlife because wildlife earns more than cattle would. Inside the boundary the parks department sets the entry fee, licenses the handful of camps and keeps the public campsites and the gate hours; the fee is the reserve's income under that arrangement, and it is inside the rate at nearly every camp we sell.

Beyond the boundary the same logic takes a second form. The land north of the Khwai River is a community concession, run by the Khwai Development Trust, the village's own body, under Botswana's community-based natural resource management programme: the trust holds the wildlife rights, contracts the camps, and takes the levy every guest pays per night — the village's income from the wildlife on its land, and the reason that land is under wildlife rather than cattle. Alongside it a private reserve holds the ground north again, under one operator, on the same logic. The Okavango Delta's two international listings, as a Ramsar wetland and then as a World Heritage Site, sit over all of it; neither changes who governs, but both raise the cost of ever governing it worse.

The reserve's science has one long thread. Its wild dogs, the delta's most watched animal, have been studied by the Botswana Predator Conservation Trust's project since the late 1980s, which is why a Moremi dog is so often seen wearing a collar, and why the reserve's packs are among the best known on the continent. Rhino, hunted out of the reserve in the last century, have been reintroduced and are guarded closely.

Khwai today, and the BaYei on the water.

The people in Moremi's history are not in its past. The BaTawana remain the tribal authority of Ngamiland, with Maun as their capital, and the kgotla that proclaimed the reserve still meets. Khwai village, on the northern bank of the river where its people were resettled, runs the community concession that carries the village's name: the Khwai Development Trust employs villagers in the camps, as guides and as trackers, and the community-run guest house at the reserve's gate is the village's own enterprise. The BaYei, the delta's boatmen, are the reason the mokoro is on every camp's programme where the water allows; the poler standing behind you is, more often than not, doing what his family has done on these channels for generations.

A stay on the Khwai side is, in practice, a stay on the village's land, and the levy in the rate is how that works. There is no staged village visit in the programme of the camps we sell and none is needed; the relationship runs through the guiding, the hosting and the concession itself.