Pie Aerts

What if the biggest lie about the Kalahari is that it’s empty? And what if it’s actually a 900.000 square-km living map of human knowledge?

I’m currently in Botswana to document a new initiative: The Kalahari San Trail. An initiative that reconnects the old San routes across the Kalahari, routes between water and family. Between hunting grounds and gathering places, sip wells, healing grounds and animal paths.

A geography carried in memory rather than on maps.

For thousands of years, San bushmen moved through this landscape reading what most of us no longer know how to see. A broken twig. A change in wind. The shape of a track. Where water might still be hiding beneath sand.

A lot of those routes are gone. Broken up by fences, farms, roads, conservation boundaries and people being moved away from ancestral land. And once people stop moving through the land, the knowledge attached to it starts disappearing too.

The San Trail is an attempt to reconnect those old pathways between people, places and wildlife and recognise the Kalahari for what it has always been: one of the world’s oldest living cultural landscapes.

So the plan is to start walking these routes again with elders, mapping them, recording the stories and waterpoints, joined by new generations of San people, while slowly stitching the landscape back together.

So in the long run, the Trail becomes both a cultural corridor and an ecological corridor.

And therefore, we’re here to help visualize the big question: Can we bring the Kalahari’s ancient knowledge back to life, by walking it again?