At the mercy of an angry giant

His death, which happened on the sidelines of a major tourism meeting, made local headlines. It did not even raise a blip on the radar of Western media that is perpetually trained on Botswana and her elephants.

Kasane sits in the heart of a five-country area known as the Kavango–Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA), a 520,000 square kilometre region of forest, swamps and huge river systems. KAZA has approximately 250,000 elephants or 60% of the continent’s pachyderms, with Botswana holding most of these at about 130,000.