Geographical Magazine ReconAfrica s plan to drill for oil in the Okavango draws the ire of environmentalists Written by Jacob Dykes 09 Jun 2021 One company’s plan to drill for oil in the Okavango Delta is raising the ire of environmentalists. As we find out, the promises of community uplift through oil extraction is not always a pathway to prosperity
In 2015, Canadian-based oil and gas exploration company ReconAfrica acquired the rights to explore about 8.5 million acres of the Kavango Basin in northeastern Namibia – one of the world’s great wilderness areas. Safe to say, this hasn’t gone down well with environmental groups. So far, however, their voices have gone largely unheeded. In January 2021, the company began to drill the first of two exploratory test wells, which will eventually be used to establish the region’s potential for oil production. The company has dubbed Africa the final frontier for oil
He loaded an ox wagon with the few provisions his meagre missionary salary would allow and set off, walking beside the jolting vehicle for 1,000km into the African interior. Thirty-three years later he would be buried in Westminster Abbey, a national hero. Since then no missionary or explorer has been more reconstructed, deconstructed, psychoanalysed or turned into a stained-glass saint. In 1854 he decided to walk clear across Africa from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. This is his journey eastwards down the Zambezi from Caprivi to the coast.
The plan was insane. After months of dehydrating himself through the Kalahari Desert, David Livingstone planned to ride his plodding white ox named Sinbad from the Chobe River to Luanda – from the eastern tip of the Caprivi Strip to the Atlantic Ocean. Then he would walk right across to the Indian Ocean.
My dream destination: Pip Murray, president, Dorothea Mackellar Memorial Society
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MY ONE DREAM DESTINATION IS STILL
Southern Africa (Botswana, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Zambia, Malawi), for the spaces, wildlife, the people. I first visited there in 1987 and have returned several times. The last trip I took in Ethiopia was wonderful - the rock-hewn churches, the art, the history and the people make this a must visit. Special memories include hitchhiking along the Caprivi Strip in 1988, hearing landmines going off in neighbouring Angola, drinking sweet tea with truck drivers, meeting peacekeeping forces in Namibia and borrowing their rafts to navigate the Popa River. The complete absence of responsibility and the liberty that brings. We were nuts.
IF it’s a cloudless day and you’re flying south over the Mediterranean to Entebbe or Johannesburg, you can see why African rivers mean life to animals, communities and crops. For half the journey, the only hint of green will be near the banks of the Nile, the desert on either side – a bit of a contrast to the view from Glasgow to London where the earth is usually saturated with water in the patches not covered by buildings and roads, rivers abounding. The Tugela is my favourite river in southern Africa. Its source is on the bleak Lesotho escarpment at about 10,000 feet, then it spills over the edge of the Drakensberg in a series of falls. In winter, these freeze and some heroes storm up the vertical ice with a terrordactyl axe in each hand and vicious toe spikes on their crampons, wreathed in testosterone fumes.
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