BOTSWANA
Let’ s begin with a confession. For the better part of a hundred years, most of the safari-going world has assumed that“ the Great Migration” was a singular East African affair: wildebeest in their millions and a crocodile or two in the Mara.
But while we were all watching the Serengeti, roughly 30 000 Burchell’ s zebra( so named after the British explorer and naturalist, William John Burchell) in northern Botswana were quietly pulling off a migration of their own, one that is, on the numbers, the longest terrestrial mammal migration in Africa. Each December, as the first rains scatter across the parched north, the herds drift south from the Chobe River floodplains, through the Kalahari’ s thornveld, to the grasslands of the Makgadikgadi and Nxai Pans. Some months later, they turn around and plod all the way back. The round trip? Roughly 500 kilometres. A zebra’ s shortlist of hobbies is admittedly narrow, but you have to admire the commitment.
For almost fifty years, the migration stopped happening. From the late 1960s, a network of veterinary cordon fences was built across northern Botswana to keep wild animals and cattle apart, mainly to meet European beef export rules. The zebras, not knowing why the land had changed, reached the fences and could not cross, so they stopped moving south. By the 1990s, the migration had disappeared from tour brochures and guidebooks, and was almost forgotten.
Then, in 2004, one of the critical fences came down. Biologists strapped GPS collars onto a small test group of zebras and waited. What the data eventually revealed, and what was formally announced to an astonished scientific community in 2014, is one of the more heartening pieces of conservation news in recent decades: the zebras had remembered the route. Not one of those first-collared animals had ever walked it. And yet, there they went, south to the pans, and back again, carrying in their hooves a cultural map fifty years dormant.
With essentially no ambient light for hundreds of kilometres, the pans act as a mirror, and the Milky Way comes down to meet itself.
The journey ends in the Makgadikgadi Pans, one of the largest salt flats in the world. For most of the dry season, it looks empty. Flat, white, and quiet, it’ s almost like the surface of the moon. Then the rains come. Grass begins to grow, and small pools of water appear where before there was only dust. And suddenly, tens of thousands of zebra arrive. They are joined by wildebeest, springbok, oryx and elephants, all coming to feed on the fresh, mineral-dense grasslands and drink in the shimmering salt pools. Lions turn up too, stalking their prey.
WINTER 2026 • rovesa. co. za | 9