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Few place names are as evocative as "the
Kalahari". This miss-spelt Anglicism has
come to represent the vastness of Africa's outback
with all the romantic undertones of nomadic
hunter-gatherers, lions and golden grasslands
gently waving under the canopy of a limitless
blue sky.
The Kalahari Desert stretches west of the eastern
hardveld, covering 84% of the country. The Kalahari
extends far beyond Botswana's western borders,
covering substantial parts of South Africa,
Namibia and Angola.
'Desert', however, is a misnomer: its earliest
travellers defined it as a 'thirstland'. Most
of the Kalahari (or Kgalagadi, which is its
Setswana name) is covered with vegetation including
stunted thorn and scrub bush, trees and grasslands.
The largely unchanging flat terrain is occasionally
interrupted by gently descending valleys, sand
dunes and large numbers of pans.
With little more than 100 to 200mm of rainfall
per year, the fauna and flora in the Kalahari
wages a daily struggle for survival. The Central
Kalahari Game Reserve covering an area just
under the combined size of Holland and Belgium,
is truly immense, and the irony is that when
it was declared in 1961 one of the primary purposes
was not necessarily to protect the animals that
lived in the area but to protect the people
that lived there.
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