Preparing for my first trip to Botswana

Here I am, one week from my very first departure to Maun, Botswana. It’s been a long time since I last travelled to a new country and it all seems suspiciously too easy. I remember how naïvely unprepared I was for my first trip out to Cameroon seven years ago. Each trip I made back into Cameroon became easier as I increasingly understood how to navigate the system, negotiate with taxi drivers, and communicate with dreaded customs agents. The idea that I don’t need a visa in advance, that I can use my credit card in most non-rural places throughout the country, and that I can drive without a problem seems so foreign and strangely unsettling to me.

This is my first of two, maybe more, long-term trips to Botswana that I will make during the course of my PhD work.  I am working with the Ecoexist Project, an NGO focused in the Ngamiland District of Botswana that works on the mitigation of human-elephant conflict (HEC). There are many complementary aspects of research being carried out in the region, some through Ecoexist and some with other NGOs, government agencies, etc., but my research is largely unique in that it focuses on the people and culture of co-existence in this part of the world.

In today’s media, consumers are bombarded with images of the ivory trade crisis. We look away from images of dead elephants with tusks hacked out of their faces, we watch as pyres of ivory are set ablaze, we see Arnold Schwarzenegger terminating the ivory trade on youtube. We’ve been media-cized to believe that all elephants are dying and they need our help (see any wildlife conservation NGO who tells you that with a small monthly contribution, you can help save the elephants)! But the reality is much more complicated than that. Elephants are intelligent and highly migratory creatures. They learn where they are in danger and where they are safe, just as they have mastered where to find surface water during times of drought. Botswana is a country known for it’s effective conservation policies and practice, and it seems that elephants are actively migrating into the country. Botswana is a rare safe haven for wildlife where populations are growing faster than the natural birth rate would possibly allow.

In the Eastern Panhandle of the Okavango Delta, there are 15,000 elephants and 15,000 people competing for land, food, and other resources. Subsistence farmers invest significant time, energy, and financial resources in order to eek out a living in the sandy environment. Elephants can creep through silently in the night, even with people actively guarding fields, and devastate up to half of an annual income in one go! To make matters more complicated, elephants are highly intelligent, charismatic, and loved all over the world. Westerners grow up seeing movies like Dumbo, reading the Jungle Book, interacting with elephants in zoos. The urban elite (including Hollywood stars) are very powerful and influence policy and perceptions of elephants, while rural people actually have to deal with the consequences of elephant conservation, ranging from agricultural loss to loss of human life.

The extensive time I spent in forested Cameroon led me to explore and understand the political ecology of elephant poaching, ivory trafficking, and the business of wildlife conservation. Now I get to set myself at a much different angle, and one that I am eagerly looking forward to. After all, there’s only so much exploration of the dark underbelly of elephant poaching (and the prayer for conservation) that one can handle before tumbling into the bottomless pit of despair and hopelessness. This new angle is, I believe (and without having as of yet stepped foot in Botswana), a story of hope in the face of adversity, the possibility that conservation can happen because people believe it is somehow important. I look forward to sharing stories, experiences, discoveries, etc. with you as my research develops. Please feel free to email, share, and comment, and I’ll do my best to keep you updated as frequently as I can!