About the park

The history of Moremi

Name: Moremi Game Reserve
Address: Botswana

Most of Africa's great parks were proclaimed by colonial governments over the heads of the people living there. Moremi was proclaimed by the people themselves. In 1963 the BaTawana of Ngamiland set aside their own hunting grounds at their own assembly, led by a widowed regent, with the colonial administration initially opposed. Here is the documented story, credit disputes included.

If you only want the answer

The BaTawana of Ngamiland approved Moremi at a kgotla assembly in 1963, on their own tribal land, making it by most accounts the first game reserve in southern Africa created by an African people on their own territory. The regent Elizabeth Pulane Moremi put her authority behind the campaign, two British residents, Robert and June Kay, connected it to publicity and support from London's Fauna Preservation Society, and historians still argue over the balance of credit. Chief's Island was added in 1976, the government took over management in 1979, and the land under the reserve still belongs to the BaTawana.

Tawana country first

The BaTawana are a Tswana people who split from the BaNgwato in the 1790s after a succession dispute and moved northwest under the young kgosi who gave them their name. They built a state around Lake Ngami and the southern Okavango, ruling over and alongside the BaYei, HaMbukushu and San communities already living on the water, and after several moves fixed their capital at Maun in 1915. Decisions in that state ran through the kgotla, the open-air assembly where a chief's proposal could be argued down in public. Remember the institution, because the reserve was born in it.

The BaTawana also had a conservation tradition of their own long before anyone in London took an interest. The chieftaincy regulated hunting, controlled the trade in skins and ivory, and closed the best game country to ordinary hunters as royal hunting grounds. The biggest landmass in the Delta was reserved for the ruling house, and the name it still carries on every map, Chief's Island, is a nineteenth-century land-use rule that survived into modern cartography.

The fly, the rifle and the cattle

What kept the Delta's interior wild into the twentieth century was mostly an insect. The tsetse fly, which carries sleeping sickness in people and nagana in cattle, made the swamps impossible for herds, so the cattle economy stayed on the dry margins and the game country inside stayed game country. The rinderpest epidemic of 1896 killed cattle and wild grazers together and shifted the fly belts, and for the next half century the tsetse frontier moved back and forth across Ngamiland with flood, drought and control campaigns that at times shot game on the theory that the fly would starve without wild hosts.

By the 1950s the pressure was arriving from every direction at once. Commercial crocodile hunters worked the channels, hunting safaris operated with few effective limits, shooting parties came up from South Africa outside any local control, and wherever the fly retreated, cattle pushed into country that had been wildlife range for generations. BaTawana elders and hunters could see the game thinning year on year, and Maitseo Bolaane, the historian who has worked through the tribal records, documents that protecting wildlife from outside hunting parties and keeping it for future local use were explicit motives. That is where Moremi begins: with owners watching their asset being stripped.

The regent and the kgotla

Chief Moremi III died in a car accident in 1946, and his widow, Elizabeth Pulane Moremi, took the regency of the BaTawana on behalf of their young son and held it until 1964. Remembered as Mma Moremi, she was one of very few women to lead a Tswana polity in the twentieth century, sat as the only woman on the Protectorate's Legislative Council, and was a reforming administrator who among other things banned hippo hunting. When the campaign to set aside the tribe's game country gathered force, it ran through her, and she put her authority behind it.

The decision was taken the Tswana way. The idea of a reserve was first raised around 1961, debated for two years, and approved at a kgotla in Maun in 1963, with the colonial administration initially opposed; some accounts date the formal designation to 1965, which is why sources give slightly different years. The reserve was proclaimed on BaTawana tribal land and named for Moremi III. Botswana's tourism authority calls it the first reserve in Africa established by local residents. The careful version, and the one we can defend, is that it was the first game reserve in southern Africa created by an African people on their own land, and even that is a claim about everyone else's history as much as Botswana's, so treat the precedence as strong rather than proven. The substance needs no hedging at all: nobody imposed Moremi on anybody. The owners of the land gave up their own hunting grounds to save the game.

The Kays, London and the question of credit

Two British residents are woven through every telling of this story. Robert Kay and his wife June had settled in Ngamiland in the 1950s, and June's book Okavango carried the Delta, and the case for protecting it, to an international readership. The couple campaigned hard for a reserve and brought the connection the BaTawana could not supply themselves: the Fauna Preservation Society in London, the body that later became Fauna & Flora International, whose journal Oryx reported on the campaign and whose network helped support the early years. Because a tribe rather than a government had proclaimed the reserve, there was no state budget behind it. It was run by the Fauna Conservation Society of Ngamiland, formed around the proclamation, with the Kays living in the reserve as its first unpaid wardens.

Who deserves the credit is genuinely contested, and we would rather show the seam than plaster over it. Older popular accounts, and plenty of safari-industry retellings today, cast the Kays as visionaries who talked a reluctant tribe into conservation. Bolaane's archival and oral-history work tells it the other way: the BaTawana had their own conservation rules, their own alarm at the losses, and their own assembly, and the decision was theirs in the only sense that matters, because only they could give up the land. On that reading the Kays were catalysts and publicists, effective ones, for a decision Africans made. The two versions rest on the same facts and differ on emphasis. We think the weight of evidence sits with BaTawana agency, and we flag the dispute rather than settle it.

What it cost at Khwai

One community paid for the reserve more directly than the rest. The BuGakhwe, River San who lived by fishing, hunting and gathering along the reserve's north-eastern edge, were resettled out of the new reserve in 1963 to the site of present-day Khwai village at North Gate. The kgotla that approved Moremi was a BaTawana institution, and the San were subjects within that state rather than equal parties to the decision. Bolaane's interviews record that many at Khwai experienced the reserve's creation as a loss handed down from above, which sits awkwardly inside the founding story and belongs in it anyway.

The later chapters are better. In 1995 the village began developing its own concession on the community land across the river, and in April 2000 it formed the Khwai Development Trust, which manages that concession and channels tourism and lease income to Khwai households. The village at the gate is both the cost of this history and its most direct continuation.

Chief's Island, the handover and what the BaTawana kept

The reserve grew and changed hands in its second decade. In 1976 the old royal hunting ground itself came in: Chief's Island, the largest landmass in the Delta, was added to the reserve, bringing the Delta's dry-season game concentrations inside the boundary and greatly enlarging the protected area. In August 1979 management passed from the tribal conservation society to the government's Department of Wildlife and National Parks, which runs Moremi today, and a further extension in 1992 gave the reserve its current shape. A volunteer society running on donations could not police a wilderness this size indefinitely; the handover reads less like a defeat than an acknowledgement.

What the BaTawana kept matters as much as what they handed over. Moremi is a game reserve rather than a national park precisely because it stands on tribal land, administered through the Tawana Land Board rather than owned by the state. The name still honours their chief. And the ring of wildlife concessions around the reserve sits on the same tribal land, leased to safari operators and community trusts, which is why villages like Khwai, Sankuyo and Mababe hold a direct stake in the wildlife economy that the 1963 decision created.

High value, low volume

Independent Botswana then made a policy choice that shaped Moremi as much as the proclamation did. The 1990 tourism policy committed the country to small numbers of visitors paying high prices, on the argument that a fragile wetland earns more and suffers less from a few expensive beds than from mass tourism. Around Moremi the model is visible from the air: small fly-in camps scattered through private and community concessions, no fences between them, and lease fees underwriting both conservation and community income.

Inside the reserve the result is a split that mostly works. A handful of lodges and four public campsites serve several thousand square kilometres, so the tracks stay quiet by the standards of famous African parks even in peak season. The honest caveats belong next to that: the pricing shuts most Batswana out of their own flagship reserve, researchers such as Joseph Mbaiwa have documented how much tourism revenue leaks abroad through foreign-owned operators, and the self-drive campsites are the one genuinely affordable way in. That door descends directly from the reserve's origin as a place a community set aside, and it is worth using.

What you can see of this history today

The map is the first monument. Chief's Island keeps the royal hunting ground alive in its name, and the reserve itself carries the name of a BaTawana chief, which makes Moremi one of very few great African protected areas named for an African ruler by his own people rather than for a river, a mountain or a colonial official.

At North Gate, Khwai village holds both halves of the story at once: the community that carried the cost, and the community concession model that grew out of the 1963 decision. Cross the bridge over the Khwai and you pass from a reserve proclaimed at kgotla to land run by a village trust, and the game does not notice the line.

Then end in Maun, because every Moremi trip starts or finishes there anyway. It has been the BaTawana capital since 1915, the kgotla where the reserve was debated still functions in the town, and the Nhabe Museum tells Ngamiland's story from the local side. The safari industry treats Maun as an airstrip with supermarkets. It is the reason the reserve exists.