African Wildlife & Environment Issue 84 2023

FAUNA, FLORA & WILDLIFE

INVESTING IN CONSERVATION SOBBE CONSERVANCY, NAMIBIA

Nowhere is this clearer than in Sobbe Conservancy in north-east Namibia where rural people have made the decision to keep a corridor open – across their lands, adjacent to their farming activities – to provide the free movement critical for the survival of elephant and many other wild species, including predators. A centuries’ old elephant path winds from Botswana, across the Kwando River into Namibia’s tiny Mudumu National Park and out of the park into grassland and mopane woodlands in what is Sobbe Conservancy. Here, more than 1 200 people live and farm, growing fields of crops which elephants love to raid and keeping small numbers of cattle, sheep and goats which are prey to lion, leopard and hyena. The elephant route crosses Sobbe’s land into a state forest and then enters Siome Ngwezi National Park in Zambia. Camera traps have revealed the immense species diversity that benefits from the corridor. Apart from elephant, other species that use Sobbe’s land include kudu, roan, eland, plains zebra, impala, giraffe, warthog, duiker, lion, spotted hyena,

Ordinary Africans, those millions of people who live on and farm the lands shared by wildlife, hold the future of that wildlife in their hands. If they decide the costs of living with elephant, lion, leopard and other species, is too high, nothing the people of the west can do will ‘save’ wild animals. Most of Africa’s wild animals, apart from those fenced inside a few score embattled national parks, will disappear in the same way that the wild boar, bear, wolf, elk, bison and most other wild species died out of Europe, Britain and the United States.

Margaret Jacobsohn Photographs: John Wesson

34 | African Wildlife & Environment | Issue 84 (2023)