THE KALAHARI TODAY: A CASE OF CONFLICT OVER RESOURCE USE

The Kalahari, misnamed a desert, has vast resources of grazing free from tsetse fly infestation, and a large wildlife population. These resources have been utilized by Man for a very long period of time, primarily by interactive hunter-gatherer and pastoralist groups. Since the mid-nineteenth century, however, pressure on this environment has steadily increased, and, especially in the last decade, the penetration of cattle herding has accelerated greatly. Fears are being voiced that excessive pressure from inappropriate systems of land use is destroying the grazing and the wildlife, leading to general environmental deterioration on a large scale. A solution to this situation probably lies in more careful and deliberate management of the resources of this unique environment, with much more emphasis being placed on wildlife rather than on cattle as a valuable sustainable source of economic usefulness to Botswana. investigations there for the British Government (Debenham, 1952). Although one year later in the same journal he was taken to task by E. J. Wayland for various scientific inaccuracies (Wayland, 1953), his paper was an important one, for in it he made out a case for the development of cattle ranching in the Kalahari. As a Colonial Service cadet at Cambridge in 1950-51, I listened attentively as Professor Debenham described his travels, little thinking that much later in my own career I would become very familiar with the Kalahari and its problems. In the period since the early 1950s the Protectorate government, and since 1967 the Government of the Republic of Botswana, have proceeded to develop use of the Kalahari grazing resource for cattle ranching. Some of the results of this have been ecologically and, in the long term, economically undesirable and an important controversy has developed as to whether productive utilization of the wildlife resources of the Kalahari might not be a better long-term policy. In this paper I propose to describe traditional attitudes to and use of the Kalahari; the developments which have taken place since 1952, but especially since 1967, and the results of such developments on the environment; and to set out the arguments put forward for an alternative strategy of development. The Kalahari environment