Kazungula

Cattle tied by the horns: Kazungula's ferry years

For about forty years, from the 1920s to the 1960s, the usual way to get an ox across the Zambezi at Kazungula was to rope it by the horns to the frame of the pontoon, ten animals a side, and let it swim. Two chiefs from the district, Morgan Makhanga and Josephat Mwezi of Kavimba, have both described it: the cattle were never loaded, only tied on and towed at the ferry’s pace. Men in dugouts drove others across loose. In 1943 alone some 8,000 head went over, bound for the Copperbelt and its mine kitchens. Mwezi remembers farmers trekking cattle here from as far as Maun even in the motor ferry’s day, because the cold storage in Zambia was just over the river and Botswana’s own abattoir at Lobatse was more than 1,000 km south.

The little sausage tree

Researchers at the University of Botswana trace the name to the Chiikuhane (Subiya) word for the sausage tree, izuungwe. Put the diminutive ka in front and you get kazuungwe, the small one. A small one is said to have stood on the south bank at the confluence before anyone formally settled here in the early 1900s. The trader George Westbeech, who worked out of Pandamatenga, is said to have run his wagon road to a sausage tree on the river. In the 1880s the Czech explorer Emil Holub had a metal pontoon put together on the Zambezi, and by the historian Jeff Ramsay’s account sold it to Westbeech when he went home. That was the first ferry here that was not a dugout.

What grew up around it was not really a village but a depot. From the mid 1930s the Witwatersrand mines recruited men here, most of them from Barotseland across the river, and sent them on to Francistown for the train to Johannesburg, by road at first and later by air too. When it asked the colonial government for a primary school in 1940, the government opened a beer hall instead. The recruiters left in 1969. Their offices stood where Kubu Lodge has been since 1986, and their barges tied up on the Chobe bank close by.

A ferry South Africa called illegal

The motorised pontoon arrived in the early 1960s, owned by Northern Rhodesia. From June 1962 it had a second name, the Freedom Ferry. Southern Rhodesia had clamped down on the route north through its own territory, so South Africans, Namibians and Zimbabweans heading into exile came up through Bechuanaland and crossed here, about 25 to a trip. The man at the controls was a Zambian, Nelson Maimbolwa, who became a contact for the ANC’s armed wing.

Pretoria’s answer was a piece of map reading. In 1970 South Africa, then holding the Caprivi, told Botswana that the four territories met at a single point, so Botswana and Zambia had no shared border and the ferry was crossing someone else’s water. Botswana said no. Most accounts add that shots were fired at the ferry during the stand-off, and some years later Rhodesian forces sank it. Seretse Khama and Kenneth Kaunda had first talked about a bridge in 1968, and the same argument stopped that too. Today’s maps show two three-country points here, not much more than 100 m apart.

The ferry’s worst day came in 2003, when a truck overloaded with cobalt slid off the pontoon. Eighteen people drowned and six got out.

What went with the queue

A pontoon took two trucks a trip, roughly 80 a day, and the line on the Botswana side could run past 2 km, with drivers parked for days and sometimes weeks. A small economy lived off that wait: women cooking bream by the weighbridge, fruit sellers, sex workers from three countries. The bridge ended most of it. A year after it opened, Zambian customs was counting more than 280 trucks a day. Zimbabwe, for the record, walked away from the project in 2007, reportedly worried about losing traffic at Beitbridge, which is why the deck swings clear of its bank.

Botswana’s own pontoon, built locally and on the river from 2010, was meant to go to the Botswana Tourism Organisation once the bridge opened. There is now a marathon over the bridge each year.

Elephants after six in the evening

The animals here are not a sideshow to Chobe National Park. They are the same animals, walking from the park and the forest reserve to the river through whatever gaps the two villages have left. Tempe Adams and colleagues, working with Elephants Without Borders, put cameras on seven of those gaps in Kasane and Kazungula from November 2012 to April 2014 and collected 2,619 elephant pictures. Breeding herds with calves and bulls both used them, even the strips through industrial plots. More of the traffic was between six in the evening and six in the morning than by day. August was the busiest month and April, just after the rains stop, the next. Fewer came through when it was raining. One camera alone picked up 19 species, from civet to buffalo.

So the honest odds: in the dry months you have a good chance of meeting elephants on the tar between Kazungula and Kasane, most of all after dark, and they cross the roads out towards Lesoma and the Zimbabwe post as well. Keep your distance. In April 2015 two elderly men were killed by elephants within three weeks, one on the Nata road and one beside the Zimbabwe border road at half past two in the afternoon.

On the river frontage the regulars are smaller. Kubu Lodge lists Chobe bushbuck, warthog and mongoose in its grounds, with hippo and crocodile in the water in front. As for camping, one overlander on the 4x4 Community forum says Kazungula is usually overrun by truckers and he would avoid it, though by his own account he had not been for a few years. The person who started the thread wanted a river view and ended up booking a camp well back from the water, on an elephant corridor.