Kgalagadi District
"Place of thirst"—Crown land that belonged to no tribe, where San hunter-gatherers were resettled and told to farm. Now 42,000 people across 105,000 km², surviving on tourism and marginal cattle.
Kgalagadi means "place of thirst," and the name explains the district better than any map. This is southern Kalahari—red dunes rolling to horizons, rainfall so sparse and unpredictable that agriculture fails more years than it succeeds, populations clustered around boreholes like organisms around vents. The district exists not because humans thrived here but because, when colonial administrators drew boundaries in the 1890s, they needed to assign the empty spaces too. What they got was Crown land: territory that belonged to no tribe because no tribe could sustain permanent settlement.
San hunter-gatherers moved through Kgalagadi for millennia, following game and seasonal water. Their survival strategy was bet-hedging incarnate: wide-ranging movement, no permanent structures, knowledge of every hidden water source across hundreds of kilometers. When Botswana achieved independence in 1966, the new government viewed this nomadism as obstacle to development. Through the 1980s-1990s, San groups were relocated from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve to settlements like Tshabong, Hukuntsi, and Werda, given boreholes and told to farm. The marginal-value theorem predicts when to abandon a depleting resource patch; the San were forced to stay in patches that never stopped depleting.
The district's modern economy reflects sparse-network-topology: widely separated nodes barely connected. Tshabong, the administrative capital, holds 8,000 people serving a district one-third the size of England. Cattle posts dot the landscape where underground water permits, but herds remain small—drought wipes them out every decade. The breakthrough came from tourism: Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, created in 2000 by merging Botswana's reserve with South Africa's, covers 38,000 km² (three-quarters in Botswana). The park sustains 470+ species on land that can't sustain agriculture—lion, cheetah, brown hyena, gemsbok adapted to months without surface water. Safari camps now employ former hunter-gatherers as trackers, paying in three days what ranch work paid in a month.
By 2025, Kgalagadi District holds about 42,000 people scattered across 105,000 km²—population density of 0.4 per km², lower than Greenland. The district's GDP comes mostly from park fees and cattle on the eastern fringe. Climate change isn't future tense here: the 2015-2019 drought killed 70% of cattle herds, and borehole levels dropped to record lows. Yet tourists keep coming—precisely because the harshness is the attraction.
By 2026, Kgalagadi faces a perverse incentive structure: the worse conditions get for residents, the better for wildlife tourism. As climate intensifies and water grows scarcer, the question becomes whether humans can maintain even sparse networks across this territory, or whether the district returns to what it was before the 1890s—space between places, territory defined by absence. The San survived here for ten thousand years by moving constantly. Their forced resettlement bet against the desert. The desert usually wins.