Steve Boyes traces life to its source in the Angolan Highlands

In June of this year, National Geographic Explorer Dr. Steve Boyes was just coming down from his latest expedition, the "Cassai Megatransect," launching near the source of the Okavango Delta in the Angolan Highlands. Covering some 469 miles (754 kilometers) in 39 days, his team explored one of the remotest, least accessible parts of Angola, a place of magic and mysticism, little-known minefields and villages, and undocumented populations of wildlife—a landscape once known by the first Portuguese explorers as “the land at the end of the earth.”

“And the land of hunger during the war,” Boyes adds. Intermittent violence through the early 2000s devastated food security and livelihoods for millions. Today people still call it home, with efforts ongoing to clear the scourge of landmines littering the area. Still, security threats remain lurking in the pristine Angolan wilderness.

“No one has navigated this river. It’s considered to be impossible, too dangerous, too difficult due to the rapids.”

Over the course of Angola’s decades-long civil war, people typically left this part of the country. It’s where rebel leader Jonas Savimbi was born and assassinated. It’s still packed with unexploded ordinance that keeps people out, and Boyes has visited the area for eight years. When he finally first reached this place in 2015, it took six months for his team to access the land, even in armored vehicles. The safest way to get around, they later found, was by water.

Experts who penned decades of research on the area could only theorize that what was buried in the bush were seasonally flooded wetlands. But over the years Boyes and his team, guided by local communities, have uncovered a system of at least 26 ancient, acidic source lakes surrounded by previously undocumented peatlands—lifelines for the notoriously arid region downstream. These vast peatlands in the Angolan Highlands are a sign of hope for the tens of millions of lives dependent on this water supply downstream, in one of the most biodiverse places in the world. 

"Initial estimates indicate there are about 7,722 square miles (20,000 square kilometers) of peatland in the Angolan Highlands Water Tower. Definitely Africa's second largest peatland source," Boyes says. But mapping efforts are still ongoing, and this number will likely increase.

“We’re talking about a vast geological structure we now identify as the ‘Angolan Highlands Water Tower.’ And this was never before understood. Our research has revolutionized our understanding of the Okavango, Zambezi, and Congo Basins.” 

Sitting atop the Kalahari Sand Basin, this water tower is the largest watershed of its kind on the planet. It supplies 95 percent of the water that sustains the Okavango Delta and is the primary water source supporting the biodiversity of the greater Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area. The peatlands represent a narrative shift for the future of downstream landscapes and their inhabitants. At the conclusion of Angola’s civil conflict in 2002, two-thirds of Angolans lacked access to drinking water. Rampant commercial agriculture, deforestation, and climate change have strained already scarce water resources. For the precarious state of water supply, the highlands’ wellspring provides an important buffering effect to the El Niño southern oscillation, arguably the world’s most important climate phenomenon.

“This represents long-term resilience to the impacts of climate change for this entire part of Africa,” Boyes emphasizes. “As an example, we found that the Okavango Delta is far more resilient than people thought. It’s far from its breaking point.” 

Since 2015, Boyes has led the National Geographic Okavango Wilderness Project (NGOWP) in surveying all major rivers of the region beginning at their little-known source in the Angolan Highlands. In partnership with local communities, NGOs, and the governments of Angola, Namibia, and Botswana, the multi-year project has explored 17 major rivers and channels covering over 7456 miles (12,000 kilometers) in total, and completed 24 biodiversity, ecological, and socioeconomic surveys. By foot, mountain bike, car, and dug-out mokoro (canoes), the team has navigated the region in an effort to secure permanent, sustainable protection of the greater Okavango Basin. 

Boyes and his expedition team explored the Lungwevungu River from its source in the Angolan Highlands Water Tower, covering 646 miles (1,040 kilometers) over 40 days, demonstrating that this river is the true source of the mighty Zambezi River, rewriting history, bolstering support for the protection of the water tower. Findings from his latest string of Expeditions confirm new information about these peatland clusters. For instance, the source of Africa’s second largest river by volume, the Cassai, a tributary of the Congo, is the Munhango River in the Angolan Highlands, and the source of the Zambezi River isn’t in  Zambia, the country named after the river.

“The NGOWP followed the floodwaters of the Okavango Delta into the Angolan Highlands and found what is arguably Africa’s largest water source. Describing the Angolan Highlands Water Tower revealed an archipelago of peatland-based water towers arcing around the Albertine Rift, the northern part of the Congo Basin, the Central African Republic, Chad, Mali, and Niger, the great divides and watersheds between Africa’s great inland river basins. The sources, peatlands and tributaries arranged along the spine represent the water security for over 800 million Africans.” 

‘The source of life’

At the time of this interview, Boyes is visibly, physically uncomfortable. He’s been barefoot for the last month until arriving in Washington, D.C., just a few days ago, and the confinement of a shoe “doesn’t feel right.” 

For 15 years now, the African wilderness has been his home and raison d'être. And through years of dodging landmines, encountering flesh-eating bacteria, and the threat of hippos tipping his mokoro, he’s remained steadfast in his mission. 

“I’ll risk my life. I’ll do anything in my power to protect that.” 

In 2001, Boyes was working toward a master’s degree, but he left it behind to take a job as head housekeeper at a camp in the Okavango. Within six months he resumed his studies and was working on his Ph.D. in the back of a Land Rover, alongside keystone populations of lions, leopards, giraffes, and ancient trees. 

Since NGOWP’s inception, Boyes and his team have identified 143 new species to academic science across all taxa, including 20 new plant species. Tarantulas with horned backs, the smallest dragonfly known in Africa, and many new species of African fish, to name a few. For this emerging center of endemism, the region’s water towers are the source of life.

Teams of scientists and conservationists collect DNA samples of aquatic life, monitor water quality, and install hydrological and meteorological monitoring stations that will feed data to future scientists about what the place was like during the 21st century. All of this scientific research, Boyes explains, is also about establishing an “early 21st century ecological baseline,” from which to rebuild a traumatized landscape through community-driven conservation efforts and sustainable development.

Boyes and his NGOWP team were the first group to visit the local Luchazi people in 42 years. The deeply isolated Luchazi built their livelihoods on navigating waterways; communities craft traditional dugout canoes from tree trunks and use them to fish, hunt, and provide for their families. This “land at the end of the earth,” the Luchazi countered, should be called “Lisima lya Mwono,” the “Source of Life.”

“I always say it took us several years and 57 scientists to realize that for ourselves, when we started discovering new species everywhere we looked and began to understand the extraordinary water storage capacity of this life-giving landscape,” Boyes says. 

In 2015, when the NGOWP team first interacted with the Luchazi, textiles and miscellaneous commercial products had made it there before them in bundles on the back of off-road motorbikes. One young boy was wearing a T-shirt with a Playstation "console plus control equals happy face," not knowing anything about the digital world. The elders were wearing beautiful old suits and dresses.

“But, from the seventies. It’s like going back in time,” Boyes recalls. “And we sit down and talk about this isolation–well they’d isolated themselves.”

For fear of kidnapping, or losing their crop to armed forces, the community steered clear of villages and remained largely in deliberate hiding. Of the millions displaced during Angola’s Civil War, many of the Luchazi remained. 

“We must celebrate those who decided to stay when everyone left,” Boyes says. An integral part of safeguarding the Okavango is rebuilding a sense of pride and ownership amongst its people. The National Geographic and De Beers partnership, Okavango Eternal, builds upon the existing NGOWP work by supporting sustainable, enhanced livelihoods, including adapting traditional practices to a changing environment. Over the years, the project has expanded from research, to establishing community-driven systems of protection; infrastructure development including schools, clinics and small enterprises; and facilitating storytelling projects.

It was the Luchazi who revealed to Boyes where to find a waterfall where experts told him it was geologically impossible. Their knowledge of the landscape, how to navigate and steward it, must be at the forefront of conservation efforts. 

Reframing conservation

“I’m not talking about national parks or game reserves, but community-driven systems of protection,” Boyes stresses. The nature of conservation is done in a specific way for communities here. To keep something safe by staying away from it is “unfathomable” he explains.

The region is home to the largest population of elephants in the world. Two-thirds of all elephants remaining in Africa live within the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area, a territory larger than the whole of California. This zone spans five countries; it cradles the Okavango Delta and borders Victoria Falls, the world’s largest waterfall. The region is also home to the planet’s largest dam, the Kariba. All of it links back to a common ancestor.

“The landscape is entirely dependent on the water tower’s flows,” Boyes says, including the Luchazi people and other river inhabitants.

Local communities know and practice small-scale agriculture, subsistence hunting, and farming. 

“They are experts in conservation. They’ve been in the business of clean air and clean water for millennia,” Boyes says. “They will tell you the different hunting seasons, the different fishing seasons, and why they burn off flood plains to create grassland corridors for animals to move up. Everything has a reason.”

The importance of the connectedness to nature for Boyes is enough to be the subject of a new project. “A week ago I was three times stronger than right now,” he says, comparing himself from an office chair, to the man paddling a fully loaded boat for eight hours a day through rapids, crocodiles, and hippos.

“I’m actually writing a book about this,” he reveals when asked to define wilderness. “It’s built into all of us. It’s foundational to who we are.”

To Boyes, the most natural thing he could be doing right now is paddle the river and bathe in its water. “I’m still adjusting to being here. These shoes just don’t feel right,” he says again. But in the wilderness, he’s completely connected in the present moment. 

“What do you take when I say, ‘land at the end of the earth?’” He revisits the meaning. His years of work and relationship-building have brought a new interpretation into view: “It’s the paradise that will remain when time ends.” 

ABOUT THE WRITER
For the National Geographic Society: Natalie Hutchison is a Digital Content Producer for the Society. She believes authentic storytelling wields power to connect people over the shared human experience. In her free time she turns to her paintbrush to create visual snapshots she hopes will inspire hope and empathy.