DAVID WALKER: I dream that one day an elephant could walk from Cape Town to Crooks Corner

In the far north-eastern region of the Kruger National Park, where the Luvhuvhu meets Kipling’s “great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River”, lies the legendary triangle of land known as Crooks Corner. Here SA, Mozambique and Zimbabwe converge under the canopy of fever trees and plump baobabs.

Crooks Corner got its name from its ideal location for those who wished to escape the law of one country by slipping easily into another, the perfect hideout for poachers and general miscreants. In one of our great conservation successes, elephants now rule these river valleys. 

At one time, before European settlement with its firearms and fences, elephants roamed freely across the entire Southern African landscape. While industrialisation and modern agriculture and medicine have brought benefits to the humans in SA and led to unprecedented population growth, the impact on the elephant population (and all other large mammals) has been catastrophic. 

We are left with smaller, scattered and fragmented elephant populations, notably in the Kruger, the KwaZulu-Natal parks and Addo. Up to recently a herd even existed in the forests near Knysna, but now this too has gone.  The remaining populations are all separated from one other by hundreds of kilometres of farmland and factories, roads and fences.

Most of our national parks are too small to support even a handful of large predators such as lions without the risk of inbreeding. We can only maintain a healthy lion population in, for example, the Karoo National Park, by regularly introducing new breeding stock. And as the population of lions grows dispersal becomes a big headache, perfectly illustrated by the adventures of Sylvester, the lion who escaped from the Karoo National Park in 2019, leading conservationists on a merry chase across more than 250km of the Northern Cape before he was eventually darted and returned.

Which brings me to the dream. What if an elephant could walk from the edge of the metro of Cape Town, unimpeded all the way, to Crooks Corner? Imagine a connected, continuous national park or nature reserve that stretched the full length of the country. Is it an impossible dream? Even if it is only achieved in 100 years, could the striving for it produce enormous successes for conservation along the way? 

We are fooling ourselves if we think our conservation work is done just because we have the Kruger and have put a fence around a few mountain zebra near Cradock and a herd of bontebok in Swellendam. Most of our large wild species exist in relatively small, disparate and disconnected spaces. This hampers the need many animals have to migrate for better grazing, or to find new water sources.

One of the greatest challenges of climate change is that it will require space for animals (and plants) to move to regions they can survive in as conditions change. At the moment this is not possible for the majority of species outside the large parks such as the Kruger. Incidentally, the savannah biome is well protected because of the Kruger, but other critical habitats such as the high grasslands and lowland fynbos are woefully underrepresented in our national parks and reserves. These two biomes have been devastated by agriculture and sprawling human development — think of endless maize and wheat fields, and Gauteng and greater Cape Town respectively.

But what if an elephant tried to walk from Cape Town to Crooks Corner? Which way would she go? She would most likely start from one of the beautiful nature reserves on the edge of Cape Town, like the Helderberg or the Hottentots Holland. She would need to head north, dodging a few towns and many wine farms, until she reached the Koue Bokkeveld, and on to the Cederberg.  Then onward across the broad plains of the Northern Cape, with a brief stop to watch the antics of crazy humans at AfrikaBurn in the Tankwa Karoo.

She would easily swim the Orange River and eventually trek through the vastness of the Kalahari. From here she could decide to continue her journey through Botswana (easier option, but possibly less food) or to stay within SA and traverse the North West province, making use of the broad, purpose-built bridge for wildlife that spans the N4 to Gaborone. Then it’s a short trundle keeping north of Polokwane, where she pauses while chewing the grass on the vegetated bridge over the N1 and listens, fascinated, to the growling of the road monsters sweeping by below. A brief march on, and into the Kruger where there are lots of other elephants to direct her to Crooks Corner and sweet, cool water. 

This journey is impossible at present. There are no purpose-built, wide, vegetated bridges for wildlife to cross the national roads. There are fences, towns, farmland and human obstacles galore. The small, scattered nature reserves are not connected. But none of these are insurmountable problems. We do not need any new technology, just the vision and political will.

By striving to connect our wild spaces to allow for the possibility of this elephant stroll, we will bring enormous benefit to the full gamut of wildlife populations; birds, amphibians, small mammals, insects and even plants. This is without considering the benefits of a vast, connected-up wilderness area for tourism, education and general human wellbeing. 

Human-free

After a time guzzling and splashing in the waters of the Limpopo, our elephant’s ancient brain turns to thoughts of Table Mountain and the flowers of the fynbos. It is time to think of heading home. But why go back the same way? Why not a trip through the green, rolling hills of KwaZulu-Natal? Lots of relatives to visit in Umfolozi and Mkuze. She has a distant, cultural memory of the taste of juicy spekboom in the Sunday’s River Valley. Then perhaps the last leg via the beautiful Baviaanskloof and the other remote valleys of the fold mountains of the Southern Cape? This journey would be even more challenging to achieve given the obstacles in the way at present.

There is a global movement spurred on by the book Half-Earth by biologist EO Wilson. Its goal is to set aside half the planet as protected area for nature. The claim is that this is the minimum necessary for the survival of the earth’s biodiversity as well as to protect humans from the worst side effects of our own activities. 

Our elephant could achieve her journey with a lot less than half of SA set aside for nature. We have the conservation expertise and a wonderful scattering of national parks and nature reserves to build on. Given the vision and the will, this is not an impossible dream.

• Dr Walker is with the department of conservation & marine sciences at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology.