The one very important question about the ownership of Moremi Game Reserve that was not answered in 1963 has come back to haunt both the Ngamiland community and the government.
At a meeting of the Batawana Tribal Council on March 12, 1963 to discuss the establishment of Moremi Game Reserve, the chief’s representative for Shorobe who is identified only as Dingalo, asked “if the projected area will belong to the morafe forever, or will the government wish, in time, to claim it from us.”
In time (which was 16 year later) the government did, through a presidential directive, claim the reserve from the community which is now fighting to reclaim it. Leading this fight is Maun West MP, Kgosi Tawana Moremi whose grandmother, Regent Mohumagadi Pulane Moremi and father, Kgosi Letsholathebe, were key figures in the establishment of the reserve. According to Tawana (although he subsequently abdicated to join politics, the MP is still more commonly known by the regnal name he took upon his installation as Batawana kgosi) the government started a consultation process to last November to unravel the ownership riddle of Moremi.
“That’s where we are at this point,” he says.
The government’s current ownership is of particular curiosity given that back in 1962, when the Ngamiland Fauna Conservation Society (NFCS) was formed with the express purpose of establishing the Moremi Game Reserve, the British colonial government was virulently opposed to such plan. Its representative in Maun was a man called Eustace Clark who held the position of District Commissioner. In token of his bad faith, Clark deployed a repertoire of incrementally devious tricks to sabotage the Moremi project. First, he attempted to use influential Wayeyi elders and headmen to oppose proposals for the game reserve. When that failed, he intimated that the colonial headquarters in Mafikeng that the establishment of the reserve represented a national security threat not dissimilar to the bloody one in Kenya that the British government was trying to put down. In her new book, “Chiefs, Hunters and San in the Creation of Moremi Game Reserve, Okavango Delta; Multiracial Interactions and Initiatives, 1956-1979”, Dr. Maitseo Bolaane writes: “The DC even circulated a rumour to Mafikeng accusing the Kays of being agitators, bent on starting some form of Mau Mau in Ngamiland. During this period, the South African press reported about the remnants of the Mau Mau movement as still constituting a great threat to the security of Kenya.” The Kays – Robert and June – were a British couple who spearheaded the formation of the NFCS. Throughout the campaign, Clark would make false and demonising claims about the couple to Mafikeng.
In Bolaane’s telling, Clark’s idea of conservation was tethered to that of white supremacy because he doubted whether Africans could be committed to wildlife conservation on a long-term basis.
Bolaane writes that in official correspondence, Clark asserted that Africans, and not Europeans, caused the greatest threat to Ngamiland fauna. In the notes that he prepared on the NFCS and Moremi, he wrote: “As elsewhere in Africa, the African considers that he has an inalienable right to kill any wildlife for himself … obviously this will not remain the position for ever and the time can be foreseen when game in Ngamiland will either be wiped out or become dangerously low. If this does take place, it will be by an African not the European.”
When a tour operator offered to contract the NFCS to build traditional huts on his property in order that it could make money it so desperately needed, Clark baulked, arguing that “the Society was not a building contractor.”
One of the people that Bolaane interviewed for her book, Jack Ramsden, told her that, “We were told by our District Commissioner at the kgotla that we could not look to the government for help. Therefore, we had to look elsewhere for financial aid.”
During this period, the Society was a shoe-string operation that suffered mightily from inadequate funding and depended on moneyed outsiders. In a letter that he wrote to Mafikeng, Clark indicated that “neither Government nor the Tribal Administration should become involved in the reserve – administratively or financially – except in an advisory capacity. The Fauna Conservation Society started the show and it is only right that they should go on with it. Control over administration and finance will be embodied in orders issued by the Regent and published in the Gazette under a High Commissioner’s notice.” With regard to the latter, and as indication of his virulent contrarianism, the DC made it clear that he intended to make the orders “pretty stringent.”
In another letter to the same addressee, Clark stated that the government agreed to the establishment of the founding of the game reserve on condition that “no funds for the establishing or maintaining the reserve can or will be provided by government.”
However, a year later, as Moremi gained international fame and the NFCS had sealed a deal with a South African company to film in Moremi, Clark’s successor, Irving Gass, wanted the colonial government to get a share of the proceeds.
Post-independence, Moremi experienced problems so severe that a kgotla meeting in 1979 resolved to hand over its management to the central government. Kgosi Letsholathebe chaired this meeting. Tawana’s contention is that this was done in the absolute belief that the reserve was not changing hands.
“The question of ownership is clear. If you hand over administration and management, you don’t change ownership,” says Tawana, meaning by that that while the Ngamiland community may have handed over management of Moremi to the government, it still retained proprietorial rights.
Legally, Moremi falls in the category of what are known as “private game reserves” and the use of this term harks back to the colonial era. Tawana makes the point that all government levels of bureaucracy leading to the approval of Moremi dealt with Moremi as a private game reserve and indeed archival records confirm that. Minutes of a three-day Ad Hoc Committee meetings that was held in Francistown in March 1963 “to discuss tourism, game etc”, state the following: “It was agreed that there was no objection to a survey of the area, which the Fauna Conservation Society of Ngamiland wished to make into a private game reserve, and it was noted that such a survey would be carried out with the Society’s private funds.” Tawana states that the Wildlife and National Parks Ac is clear on the exclusion of “private game reserves” from regulations of the Department of Wildlife and National Parks. By his reckoning, “Moremi Game Reserve is just like the Letsididi estate; it belongs to you and your family – not the government.” One of Clark’s letters says that “the tribe donated the land in a full kgotla meeting.” This happened before the establishment of land boards. Bolaane’s book says that even after the government takeover, “Moremi remained the property of morafe [tribe].”
The other point that Tawana makes is that there was no way that the government could take over the NFCS because it was not a statutory construction but one of custom and tradition. He adds that the mandate of statutes does not extend to such arrangements.
In a related campaign, the Maun community is also waging a parallel campaign to reclaim another NFCS asset – the Maun Educational Park – which also somehow became government property. Moremi says that the idea for the park was originated by a man called Peter Slogrove. He enlisted the support of Kgosi Letsholathebe who was amenable to the idea and in 1969, land was acquired for the park on behalf of the NFCS. For some unclear reason, the letterhead used for such acquisition was that of the Department of Wildlife and not of the Society. Tawana, who has been sifting through the facts of the change of ownership, says that in 1998, the Department asked for a copy of the lease. Thereafter, the government came into legal possession of the park under what remain unclear circumstances.
“There is neither any record of consultation nor of the owners giving consent that the Wildlife Department should gain possession of the park,” says Tawana.
He adds that the supreme irony of it all is that the Botswana Tourism Organisation is now telling the community that it is underutilising the park when it has actually been in the hands of the Department of Wildlife. The MP says that representations made to both houses of parliament as well as the Office of the President have not borne fruit. “Pressure groups were dismissed without audience,” he says.
