THE WISDOM TO LEAVE IT WILD | BOTSWANA AT SIXTY

Once again, last month, I had the privilege of spending a few days in Botswana’s Okavango Delta, with our exceptional Xigera team.

For me, September is one of the most magical times in the Delta. The time when waters begin their slow retreat. Lions that only weeks before had been calling across expanses of water were again moving through open grasslands, their roars carrying across the night as they redrew their territories. Endangered wild dogs were denning not far from the Lodge, with the extraordinary sight of eight young cubs tumbling between the adults, all curiosity and fragility. A herd of elephants crossed the land, tiny calves disappeared beneath their mothers, held securely within the great moving architecture of legs and bodies.

And then there is the stillness, that extraordinary moment when the engine is switched off, the noise that fills our lives gently falls away, and we rediscover that one of the greatest luxuries is having enough space to hear ourselves again.

With the team, we spoke with great reverence about Botswana approaching its sixtieth anniversary of independence on 30 September. Six decades of hope, creation, vision, and conviction. Subtly Jacks, our Executive Housekeeper reached for a Boipuso 60 pin and placed it on my jacket. 

A Boipuso 60 pin carries more than a commemorative number. It represents Botswana’s 60 years of celebrating sovereignty, nationhood, progress and the enduring values that have shaped its journey. For the wearer, it is a symbol of pride, responsibility and hope. It was a small gesture, but in that moment, it was an expression of belonging, of sixty years carried in the people standing beside me.

Wearing that pin, in the heart of the Delta, I found myself looking differently at what surrounded us. Not only gratitude for the extraordinary beauty before us, but also at the generations of choices, care and conviction that had allowed it still to exist. And I felt deeply responsible. Because when we stand inside such splendour, such abundance, it is easy to imagine that this is simply Africa, as it has always been. Wildlife moving along pathways older than memory. Floodplains filling and emptying according to their own rhythms. Vast tracts of land left open enough for nature to move freely. It is tempting to believe that this wilderness exists simply because it is wild.

It does not. Wild places survive because, somewhere along the way, someone made a choice to allow them to remain wild. And perhaps this is one of the more profound ways to think about Botswana as it celebrates its independence, not only through everything the nation has built, but also through what it has had the wisdom not to destroy.

When Botswana became independent in 1966, it was one of the world’s poorest countries. Its mineral wealth, most significantly diamonds, would help finance an extraordinary national transformation, contributing to roads, schools, healthcare and the foundations of the modern nation it is today. That part of Botswana’s story matters enormously.

But looking out across the Delta, I appreciate another kind of wealth, a wealth that cannot be mined, placed in a vault or measured in financial terms. It moves with water and season. It follows pathways remembered by generations that will never know the lines that have been drawn upon maps. It floods, it changes, it renews itself. And ultimately, it belongs not only to those of us fortunate enough to experience it today, but also to people we will never meet.

Long before sustainability became the language of corporations, conferences and global policy, Botswana made space for wilderness. Today, nearly 40 per cent of the country lies within national parks, reserves and wildlife-management areas, with much of this landscape remaining unfenced and allowing animals to move according to water, season, instinct and memory.

There is something profoundly moving in this because genuine stewardship begins with the humility to recognise that not everything entrusted to us is ours to consume. Some things are simply ours to to share with the natural world to which they have always belonged and care for during that brief period in which they pass through our hands. Nowhere have I felt this more powerfully than in the Delta. Seen from above, the Okavango Delta crosses the Kalahari like a hand laid tenderly upon the earth. Its great channels divide into ever smaller fingers of water, carrying life deeper and deeper into the landscape. Those waters begin their journey, months earlier, as rain falling in the Angolan highlands before then slowly making their way southwards. Here, the landscape reminds us of something modern life has made remarkably easy to forget; we are not separate from nature. We have always been part of the same living system. And we have a responsibility to protect it.

That understanding is woven into Botswana’s history. I was fascinated to learn from Ike, our head personal guide, that the Moremi Game Reserve was created in 1963, a time before Botswana achieved its independence, because the Batawana people were concerned by the disappearance of wildlife from their ancestral lands. There is something exceptionally farsighted in that decision; a society recognising that when something precious begins to vanish, there comes a point when concern needs to become action.

Conservation here was therefore never about only protecting animals. It revealed, more than six decades ago, an understanding of the relationships between people and land, land and water, water and wildlife, and the recognition that the wellbeing of one cannot be separated from the wellbeing of the others.

This is why I have never believed that nature sits outside the economy, as though protecting it were an alternative to progress. Nature came first, water, soil, climate, biodiversity and human wellbeing. We inherited all of these before we created anything else. Perhaps conservation and prosperity are therefore never meant to stand on opposite sides of the same argument. The deeper challenge is how we can learn to prosper without diminishing the systems that make life, and consequently prosperity itself, possible.

But standing in the Delta, this thought felt too academic, after all the Delta does not ask to be understood as an idea. It simply asks to be felt in its own rhythm, the movement of water, in the sudden appearance of life where moments before there seemed to be none. Somewhere in that experience, thought gives way to something deeper. It moves you. It reminds you that some truths are not discovered through argument or analysis, but through the humbling realisation that we belong to something far greater than ourselves.

Perhaps this is why the word safari feels so fitting. From the Swahili for “travel”, itself rooted in the Arabic safar, meaning “journey”, it suggests something more than moving across a landscape. At its core, safari is an invitation to understand a little more deeply. To notice nature more carefully. To listen to place. To become more aware of the relationships that hold it together, and of our place within them. Its measure, then, is not how much we see, but how deeply we allow ourselves to feel where we are.

This belief is woven into the DNA of Xigera. My wife Toni, in her Xigera vision, never set out to create another luxury lodge in Botswana. She looked to the Delta to lead us and, in doing so, sought to create a place where guests might connect longer rather than move faster. Where every hour did not need to be filled before the day had even begun and where art, food, design, guiding and hospitality were not distractions from the wilderness, but different ways of engaging more deeply with it.

Because gifts of a place are rarely physical, they are what it teaches us; the knowledge we gather, the questions it awakens, the emotions it stirs within us, and the way it sharpens our attention and can awaken our understanding of the world and our place within it.

And then, literally days before Botswana’s sixtieth anniversary, something happened that filled all of us at Xigera with immense pride. For the first time ever in its history as a nation and destination, Botswana was included among the destinations recognised by the MICHELIN Guide for hotels, with Xigera receiving Two MICHELIN Keys.

MICHELIN Keys offer a global recognition in hospitality, but what I find meaningful in them is their attention to individuality and sense of place. In a world that can so easily become standardised, they recognise properties that are true to where they are, to the people who shape them, and to the story they are able to share. Not only through their service or design, but through the feeling a guest carries away. This is what makes the recognition so special, it places a wider light on something deeply local, reminding us that the most meaningful hospitality is often found not only in what is provided, but in what a place allows us to understand, feel and remember.

We are of course, deeply honoured that Xigera received Two MICHELIN Keys. But what stayed with me was not the recognition itself. It was everything that had made it possible. Xigera could only ever be what it is because of Botswana, because of this extraordinary Delta, because of the people whose knowledge, care and connection to this place shape it every day, because wildlife still has the freedom to move, because water is able to follow the course it chooses, and because generations before us had the foresight to leave enough space for the wild to remain wild. 

And this is why the timing felt so significant. On the eve of Botswana’s sixtieth anniversary, this was recognition of Xigera, but is also appreciation of something much larger; what is possible when a nation has the foresight to leave enough of itself intact for generations still to come to experience wonder.

This is leadership of a different kind. Not only of building, creating and advancing, but the wisdom to know when to intervene and when to allow something greater than ourselves to continue on its own course. It asks us to recognise that intelligence does not belong to us alone. Nature has its own wisdom, shaped over millennia, and sometimes our greatest contribution is simply to give it the space to flourish.

It is the understanding that progress cannot always be measured by what we add, because sometimes its most enduring expression is found in what we choose to protect, preserve and pass forward.

And so, as Botswana looks towards the next sixty years, I find myself asking not only what the nation will build, create or achieve, but what it will want to still be here when another generation gathers to celebrate its hundredth anniversary. Botswana’s first great transformation was built, in no small part, upon what lay beneath its ground. Its next will surely come from many different places; education and enterprise, creativity and technology, human capability and possibilities we cannot yet imagine. But I hope it will also come from an ever-deeper appreciation of what is already here, and has been for generations.

Because perhaps this is the greater lesson Botswana offers us today. Progress does not always proclaim itself through what we add to the world. Sometimes it is found in what we have had the wisdom not to lose. The wealth of a nation cannot be measured only by what it takes from beneath its ground, nor even by everything it manages to build upon it. Sometimes its greatest wealth lies in what it has the wisdom to leave alive.

Pula, Botswana. 

Photo credit: Carike Seager