Central Kalahari Game Reserve

The Central Kalahari Game Reserve is a National Park in Botswana was established in 1961 and is located in the Kalahari sand desert in southern Africa.

Landscape

The park covers an area of ​​52,800 km ², making it the world's second largest game reserve. The land is mostly flat and gently covered with bushes, grass, sand dunes and large trees. Many of the rivers are petrified salt flats. Four fossilized rivers cut through the reserve and also the Deception Valley, which began to form 16,000 years ago.

Animals

The park is home to animals such as Giraffe, brown hyena, warthogs, cheetahs, wild dogs, leopards, lions, wildebeest, eland, gemsbok, kudu and red hartebeest.

Resident

The Basarwa or San inhabited the area for many decades, they moved through the area as nomadic hunters. 5,000 Gana, Gwi and Tsila Bushmen ( and their neighbors, the Bakgalagadi ) lived peacefully in the reserve until, in the 1980s there were diamonds discovered

In the early 1980s, diamonds were discovered in the reserve. It was soon communicated to the Kalahari Bushmen of government officials that they had to leave the reserve because of the discovered diamonds. In three major evictions in 1997, 2002 and 2005 all the Bushmen were evicted from the reserve. They now live in resettlement camps outside the reserve. After years of litigation, the most expensive in the history of the country, was the man finally granted the right in 2006 to return to their ancestral land.

However, the Botswana government denied the Bushmen access to clean water and destroyed the water source on the reserve, so they had to travel long distances to get drinking water. After further negotiations was granted them the right to water in January 2011, in a historic judgment finally.