By Leon Marshall
Through the mind's eye it is breathtaking: a vast African landscape where wildlands are linked across national boundaries and where the common priority between countries is the preservation of nature and the promotion of tourism.
This, indeed, is the vision for the proposed Kavango-Zambezi (KAZA) Transfrontier Conservation Area that is intended to constitute a 287 132 square kilometre chunk of Africa, which comes to almost the size of Italy.
There are estimated to be only about 2,5 million people living in the entire area, which adds to its potential for being developed as an enormous protected area.
Similar transfrontier projects have been put together with varying success in southern Africa, including the Kgalagadi Park shared by Botswana and South Africa, the Great Limpopo Park between Mozambique, Zimbabwe and South Africa, the Ai-Ais/Richtersveld Park between Namibia and South Africa and several more also involving Lesotho and Swaziland.
But the so-called KAZA Park is the most wildly ambitious. It is one that holds far-reaching implications for the region's tourism development and for conservation, not least that of providing Africa's biggest elephant population with a drastically enlarged roaming area and saving it from the prospect of culling.
For a large part of the proposed parkland there is also the promise of escape, eventually, from the most dismal privations imaginable that had been inflicted upon it by one of the continent's longest and most brutal wars. This is the sizeable section falling in Angola where that country's prolonged anti-colonial and subsequent civil war had left a particularly sad legacy of human suffering and dislocation.
Altogether, the joint conservation area is intended to span the borders of five southern African countries. A memorandum of understanding committing their governments to work jointly towards its establishment was signed by their representatives at a ceremony at the Victoria Falls this week.
They were the minister of hotels and tourism of Angola, Eduardo Jonatão Chingunji; the minister of environment, wildlife and tourism of Botswana, Kitso Mokaila; the minister of environment and tourism of Namibia, Willem Konjore; the minister of tourism, environment and natural resources of Zambia, Kabinga J Pande; and the minister of environment and tourism of Zimbabwe, Francis Nhema.
As with most transfrontier-park developments in southern Africa, a driving force behind the concept has been the Peace Parks Foundation, which was established in the Nineties by industrialist Dr Anton Rupert to promote such projects. Its feasibility study, co-funded and facilitated by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) in the Netherlands and the British-based Rufford Maurice Laing Foundation, showed that it would be possible for the five countries to sign a treaty setting the project in place before 2010.
A transfrontier conservation area (TFCA) is less precise than a transfrontier park, which amounts to the actual linking of parks across national boundaries to practically form a single reserve. The former is defined by the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Protocol on Wildlife Conservation and Law Enforcement as "the area or component of a large ecological region that straddles the boundaries of two or more countries, encompassing one or more protected areas as well as multiple resource use areas".
The basic idea of a TFCA is for member countries to promote the conservation of shared wildlife and socio-economic development through ecotourism and related activities like jointly regulated safari hunting. It holds the possibility of reserves being opened to each other across boundaries, as is indeed a prospect for many of the 36 parks said to fall within the proposed KAZA conservation area.
The fact alone that it is intended to include Botswana's Okavango Delta and the Victoria Falls between Zimbabwe and Zambia already lends it great prestige.
The falls are a World Heritage Site and are classed as one of the natural wonders of the world. The delta, spread over about 17 000km2 of northern Kalahari sand and consisting of a maze of lagoons and channels, is the world's biggest Ramsar site, designated so under the world convention on wetlands of international importance.
It makes sense that the project should be centred on the region's river system. The Kavango and Cuito rivers that feed the delta have their source in the distant Angolan highlands, and the Zambezi River, too, largely originates in that country before passing through Zimbabwe to form the country's border first with Namibia's Caprivi strip and then Zimbabwe.
Another key element is Botswana's 10 566km2 Chobe National Park, which has one of the greatest concentrations of game on the continent, including most of the region's estimated 120 000 elephants.
While a growing headache to park authorities because of their destruction of the habitat, the enormous elephant herds could turn into the single most attractive feature of the whole arrangement. Werner Myburgh, the Peace Parks Foundation's KAZA project manager, talks of them as a potential marketing tool in a sense much like the Serengeti's wildebeest.
He says the Zambian government is keen to have a corridor that links Chobe to its 22 400km2 Kafue Park. He is optimistic about the chances of doing so, as the corridor would cross a part of the Caprivi strip which is already a community conservancy. The remaining Zambian stretch of about 80 km to Kafue consists of community land that also includes game management areas.
By allowing game and tourists to move between the parks, the link-up could become a central feature of the project. Like Chobe, Kafue boasts an enormous range of wildlife. Though lacking management and tourist infrastructure, Myburgh says this is changing fast through large investments by the World Bank and tourist facilities created particularly by the Wilderness Safaris group.
But it is the proposed contribution from Angola that perhaps best reflects the enormity of the change of attitude that has come about in the wider region since the demise of Unita leader Jonas Savimbi five years ago brought an end to that country's protracted conflict.
The KAZA map area encompasses substantial portions of the country's extensive Moxico and Cuando Cubango provinces, both of which are said to have barely started to recover yet from their brutal savaging under the civil war.
They border Bie province which housed Unita's Huamba headquarters, and Cuando Cubango includes Cuito Canavale, scene of the bloody closing battle in 1988 between South African and MPLA troops.
Both provinces are still littered with landmines, with relief agencies continuing to report deaths and mutilations in addition to the starvation and displacement suffered by their small populations. The 199 049km2 Cuando Cubango only has about 140 000 people, and the 223 023km2 Moxico, birthplace of Savimibi, has about 230 000.
The war had taken as heavy a toll on their animal life. Elephant ivory served to pay for weaponry, and much of the rest of the wildlife became bushmeat for soldiers and famished villagers.
Burgher says that, cleared of minefields, the territory offers a vast new home particularly for the northern Botswana elephants. Some have indeed already started drifting across.
He says he was taken on a flight over the area recently and it made for a remarkable sight. "There were hardly any huts to be seen, and no roads. I thought to myself this is wild Africa, without game."
But he is confident the transfrontier conservation project will succeed. "The ministers involved are young, enthusiastic and energetic. The political will exists, and there is the expertise and the funding coming in to see it through," he says.