Mokolodi Nature Reserve

The elephants that embarrassed a president at Mokolodi

On 10 July 2003 George W. Bush stood in the thornveld south of Gaborone with his wife Laura and their daughter Barbara, posed for the cameras beside two tame elephants. A Washington Times reporter in the press pool wrote down what came next. The bull, Shaka, picked that moment to try to mount the cow, Thandi. The journalists fell about. Barbara covered her face and the president pulled his cap down over his. The elephants’ trainer, a Sri Lankan called Uttum Corea, told him this was how elephants learn about “the birds and the bees”.

There are no elephants at Mokolodi now. How they came and went is the strangest part of the reserve’s past.

Four cull orphans who took orders in Sanskrit

Corea had settled in Botswana with his family, and trained thoroughbred horses as a hobby. One evening in 1990 they watched a television report on the elephant cull in the Kruger National Park, and he decided to take in two calves orphaned by culling in South Africa. Shaka and Thandi were two years old when he brought them north at his own expense and put them on an eight-acre plot he called Serendib, an old name for Sri Lanka. Two years later, after another cull, he added Sukiri and Seeni, both about 18 months old.

He had been told in Africa that an African elephant cannot be tamed, and he meant to prove otherwise. A Colombo newspaper that profiled him in 1998 reported a Sri Lankan mahout teaching Batswana apprentices, with the commands given in Sanskrit. By then eight acres was too small and the four had moved to Mokolodi, where children fed them and tourists went on walks behind them.

An online register of elephant keepers records that on 8 April 2008 two of the project’s Sri Lankan handlers, Chandan Alahakoon, who was 38, and Piyal Pedige, 35, were killed by elephants at the reserve. A Yale student who wrote up a stay in May 2013 listed elephant among the animals Mokolodi does not have, and none of today’s activities involve one. Nothing I have read says what became of the four.

A lawyer’s cattle farm with a radar on the hill

The land belonged to Ian and Gwithie Kirby. He grew up in Rhodesia, was thrown out of South Africa for his politics and came to Botswana in 1969 as a government attorney. She was raised in Kenya and worked as secretary to the vice president, Quett Masire. They met in Lobatse, married in 1971, and took on a farm here for cattle and crops. It employed nine people. The reserve that replaced it came to employ more than 70.

The drought of the early 1980s stripped the grass and the herd had to go. The story told at the reserve’s 30th anniversary in 2024 is that a family friend, Peggy Appiah, had remarked to the Kirbys that children were growing up without ever seeing a wild animal. She was a children’s author, the daughter of the British chancellor Sir Stafford Cripps. The Kirbys gave a large part of the farm to a foundation whose board first met under Ian Khama, then an army general and later president.

A review of the Kirbys’ 416-page memoir, Mokolodi (2024), says they also gave a hilltop to the Botswana Defence Force for a radar station, in the years when South African raids on Gaborone were a regular fear. Bill Clinton sat down with five African environmentalists at the reserve on 31 March 1998 and thanked the Kirbys by name.

Rhino sent to the delta, cheetah sent to India

Mokolodi’s white rhino came up from South Africa in the 1990s. In October 2001, after four weeks in pens at Serowe, some of them were trucked much further north, to holding pens at Mombo on Chief’s Island, in a delta where white rhino had been poached out. Three of the first five animals put back into Moremi were bought from Mokolodi. Two were females who knew each other, and Nick Galpine, who looked after the pens, noted that sharing one settled the younger animal, Kabelo. The pair were released on 9 November 2001 with Ian Khama, by then vice president, looking on.

Rebecca Klein arrived to work at Mokolodi in 2001 and looked after two tame cheetahs, Duma and Letotse. She found that nobody in the country was working to protect the wild ones, and in 2003 she and two colleagues started Cheetah Conservation Botswana here. In August 2010 a wild dog male and his pups, caught at a den near Tsabong after a farmer lost cattle, were penned here with three orphaned females and released as a pack in the northern Central Kalahari on 31 August. And in November 2025 eight cheetahs caught around Ghanzi were in the quarantine pens here when President Boko handed them over to India’s President Murmu, bound for the Kuno National Park.

What a drive turns up, and what it does not

Student groups wrote up their drives here in 2013, 2017, 2023 and 2024, and the lists are short. Giraffe and impala are in every one. Kudu and ostrich are in most, and warthog, zebra and wildebeest turn up now and then. Rhino are less certain than those lists make them look. One group in June 2023 counted five and another a month later met a cow and calf after the first hour of their first drive, but that group’s leader pointed out that some people come several times and never see one.

The only hippo sighting in these accounts was at dusk. The 2013 visitors counted two, heads just out of the water, as the sun went down over Mokolodi Dam. Nobody in these accounts saw a leopard. The hyenas they describe were two spotted ones behind a tall fence, and their guide, Onks, brought them running after sunset by shaking it.

Then there is Alice. In November 2022 a zebra of that name and her mate, Wonderboy, were keeping close to the restaurant and walking up to visitors, and the following June a student group stroked her. Do not feed her. Mokolodi is a small reserve beside a city, and people in Botswana told the Yale group straight that for lion, buffalo or elephant you go to the Central Kalahari or the delta.