Good Fences, 

 Good Neighbors? 



Can Botswana simply cordon off the conflicts dividing 

 ecotourism, cattle farming, and the interests of conservation? 



By Graciela F I ores 



A few months into the construction of the 

 240-mile-long Makgadikgadi fence, David 

 Dugmore drove along the first stretch of 

 cable wire slung between vertical wooden posts. It 

 was the dry season in north central Botswana, and 

 Makgadikgadi Pans National Park, now bounded 

 on the west by the fence, was stark and grim, its 

 wildlife seemingly consigned to the dusty past. The 

 seasonal drought from March through October had 

 transformed the park into a lunar landscape shim- 

 mering with salt crystals — one of the largest salt pans 

 in the world. But on this day, the austere beauty 

 seemed more like a killing field. As he drove, Dug- 

 more, the owner of a safari camp, counted zebra 

 carcasses lining the fence. "There was at least one 

 every kilometer," he recalls. 



Roughly a hundred zebras died in a single month 

 in 2004, before the fence was even completed. The 

 zebras, on their annual migration to water holes and 

 grazing areas to the west, had probably died from stress 

 and dehydration when they met the new barrier. Oth- 

 ers likely died in the jaws of hyenas or lions, which 

 have learned to stampede zebras into the wire grids. 



In one deadly week in 2005, some 250 zebras per- 

 ished on their annual trek. Again, drought had forced 

 them to search for water and grazing land, but again, 

 the fence thwarted them. By the time the rains came, 

 it was too late. "We were still removing dead ani- 

 mals from around the water hole as the grass grew 

 around them, forming perfect outlines of their bod- 

 ies lying in the sand," says Dugmore. 



The Makgadikgadi fence is part of an intricate net- 

 work offences that crisscross thousands of miles of 

 Botswana. Most of the fences were built to contain 

 cattle and limit the spread of disease from wildlife to 

 livestock — so-called veterinary fences. But the Mak- 

 gadikgadi is not a veterinary fence; it is a "wildlife 

 fence," the first of a new breed of fence designed to 



Hundreds of zebras, like the one in the photograph, have 

 died because the Makgadikgadi fence, visible in the back- 

 ground, cuts off their annual migration route to dry-season 

 water sources. 



reduce conflicts between people and wildlife. Specif- 

 ically, it was built to stop lions from attacking cattle, 

 to stop villagers from retaliating against the lions, and 

 to protect the grazing land of the wildlife in the park 

 from the cattle. In short, its function was to balance 

 the needs of a pastoral way of life centered around 

 cattle raising with the needs of a rapidly growing 

 tourism industry that depends on the wildlife. 



The government finished building the fence in 

 2004 and, indeed, it has largely solved the problems 

 it was designed to solve. But the law of unintend- 

 ed consequences never rests, and the fence has 

 spawned a host of new problems. Most troubling is 

 that the fence is proving a deadly nemesis for wild- 

 life. Today, eighteen months after its completion, 

 the ambiguous nature of the Makgadikgadi fence 

 continues to stir debate among conservationists, 

 government agencies, and local communities. 



Long before the fences, long before the govern- 

 ment itself, the salt pans of Botswana were a mas- 

 sive inland lake. The lake dried out more then 2,000 

 years ago, leaving the salt pans in its place, but the re- 

 gion retained the two seasons of the tropics, dry and 

 wet. The seasonal oscillation drives one of the largest 

 annual migrations in Africa. Every year, when the 

 pans dry up, the animals retreat, seeking refuge among 

 the water holes to the west. In Setswana, the nation- 

 al language of Botswana, Makgadikgadi means "vast, 

 open, lifeless land." The term could hardly describe 

 the pans more accurately, at least in the dry season. 



When the rains come, though, the pans explod- 

 ed with life. The herds of herbivores and their preda- 

 tors return from their dry-season retreats to fill the 

 surrounding grasslands. Thousands of flamingos and 

 pelicans and a rich array of rare birds flock into the 

 sanctuary. The pans in flood are no less dramatic. 

 From 4,000 feet up, they look like a handful of sap- 

 phires set in the grasslands between the parched 

 Kalahari Desert in the south and the lush waterways 

 of the Okavango delta in the north. 



Overlain on that natural setting is modern Bo- 



June 2006 NAT UK A l HISIORY 49 



