Mangetti National Park

Rundu's zoo animals, lost roan and the dogs that won't stay in

In 1997 a load of animals from Rundu Zoo was let go in Mangetti. The game capture records list them: five porcupines, a caracal, a black-backed jackal, one oryx and one red hartebeest. The helicopter count of 2019 found two red hartebeest in the whole park. The ministry’s management plan wants those last ones taken out and tsessebe brought in to replace them.

That is Mangetti in one story. Almost every large animal you see here arrived on a truck, or descends from one that did.

A park stocked by the lorry load

The oddest entry is the first. In 1972, a year before the fence went up, three giraffe were caught here and sent to the Waterberg. Nineteen years later the traffic turned round. In 1991, after a Cabinet decision of 1988 had made the block a breeding camp, 40 giraffe came up from Etosha in two loads of 20 (five bulls and 15 cows each time), with 19 blue wildebeest from Daan Viljoen and 40 sable from Mahango. Oryx followed from Etosha in 1995. The 100 zebra behind today’s herds only came in 2009.

Not all of it worked. Twenty roan released in 1996 simply disappear from the record, and the management plan admits it does not know what became of them. A 1997 entry has 20 sable arriving from Daan Viljoen, which the same plan doubts, since Daan Viljoen never kept sable. Fewer than half the oryx brought in are still there, and the plan says the rest should go, being dry-country animals in woodland that is too wet for them. Giraffe are the real puzzle: 58 brought in over the years, 27 counted in 2019. When 13 more came from the Waterberg in June 2020, one bull went straight through the eastern fence.

Eland made up for all of it. By 2007 there were enough to send 113 to the Mashi and Mayuni conservancies and Mudumu, and during the 2024 drought 157 animals were hunted here for relief meat. Mangetti has turned into a park that exports.

The dogs nobody put there

Wild dogs came by themselves, and they treat the fence as a suggestion. Most of their range is cattle country, not park, the ministry says, and Robin Lines, who started the Namibian Wild Dog Project in 2002, wrote of dogs being seen on the Mangetti farms and of farmers who shoot them and say nothing. In June 2010 farmers just south of the veterinary fence, tired of losing stock, dug out a den and found 14 pups about two weeks old. Lines flew up with Rudi and Marlice van Vuuren and took the litter to N/a’an ku sê near Windhoek, where they were bottle fed every hour. Nadia and Jaco, siblings rescued from the same sort of trouble around Mangetti, were in a pack of five shot at on the foundation’s reserve in February 2019 by men said to be after a kudu the dogs had killed. Three of the five died.

A male collared inside the park in November 2015 ranged far beyond it over the next six months. Camera traps picked up two packs in 2017 and 2018, then none at all in 2019, and the ministry now suspects the dogs stopped being residents around 2017. They have bred in the park before and may again. Treat a sighting as luck.

Rhino hunts and an old camp at Middle Dam

Here is the part the brochures skip. According to its own management plan, Mangetti is the only park in southern Africa where black rhino are hunted as a matter of routine: particular old bulls, picked out by the ministry. The park went to auction as part of a Western Kavango hunting concession in April 2009. The concession was handed back in 2020, two years early. Rhino hunts stay in the ministry’s hands. The lodge that has been promised for years is meant to stand at Middle Dam, on the ruin of the old hunting camp. The pens where rhino were held before release were still standing at Boma water point when the plan was written in 2020.

Two things are missing. Buffalo lived across much of this sandveld until the rinderpest of the 1890s, and foot and mouth rules have so far stopped the ministry bringing them back. And the 1995 count found 19 elephant inside; none has been counted in the park since, though they still pass through.

The tree in the name, and one to avoid

The mangetti is the mongongo, the nut tree of the Kalahari sands, whose fruit drops between March and May. The anthropologist Richard Lee, writing in 1968, quoted a San man who saw no point in planting crops while the world held so many of these nuts. Elephants swallow the fruit and pass the nut intact.

The plant to worry about is gifblaar, an “underground tree” with only its leafy tips above the sand. It sprouts late in winter, before the grass, and for much of the dry season it can be the only green thing on offer. Newly released animals are most at risk, so the plan wants releases timed for when other green food is about.

What the people who do come complain about

Visitors, by the ministry’s own account in 2020, grumble about two things: getting lost, and animals that bolt on sight. The map handed out at the gate showed the firebreaks, not the tourist tracks or the waterhole names, and so few cars come that the game never learns to ignore one. The plan’s answer is walk-in hides at the water. None had been built when it was written. All seven boreholes sit in the streets between the dunes, and the dunes are only 10 to 20 m high. The pumps run mostly on solar and fall behind in the hot dry season, which is exactly when demand peaks. The late dry season is also when fire comes: 70% of the park burnt in 2011. And in March 2024 three soldiers deployed here were caught crossing the fence with bags of dried eland, kudu and wildebeest meat.