SAVUTE CHANNEL

The Savute River, sometimes called the "Ghost River", is surrounded by mystery and gives a very special aura to the region in which it dug its bed. This river, with its unpredictable and capricious flow, which for years has caused surprise and controversy in the small world of geologists and naturalists, has been described many times by explorers and guides. These notes, essential to perceiving the inconsistency of the Savute "phenomenon", clearly underline the sporadic and abrupt changes in the river's course: when David Livingstone and Henry Cotton Oswell crossed this part of present-day Chobe Park in 1851, they described the Savute as a river 36 m wide and 1 m deep. In 1874, Frederick Courteney Selous, another explorer, noted that the river ended its course in the Mababe Depression, which it partially flooded. When he returned to the same place in 1879, Selous noticed that the water level had dropped considerably and that the river no longer flowed to the basin. In fact, the Savute dried up a year later, in 1880. For 77 years, the riverbed remained dry; then, in 1957-1958, the Savute began to flow again abruptly, only to stop again in 1965; the interruption this time was brief and, in 1967, the mysterious flow reappeared, only to vanish in 1982. In 2008 the river was reborn, flowing only on the first ten km of its bed. Remarkably, it reached the Savute marsh again, to the delight of travellers! Which is fortunate, indeed, because when the river flows in Savuti, the fauna is even more abundant and diverse. Strangely enough, the flow of the Savute River does not seem to be related to the rains nor to the importance of the flooding of the Okavango. Geologists and scientists have not yet been able to discover the reason for its sudden drying up. As northern Botswana is located at one end of the Great Rift Valley, explanations for the high tectonic activity in Ngamiland are most often given: the ground is moving in this part of the country, and the 21 earthquakes recorded there between 1965 and 1971 certainly had an impact on the geology and hydrology of the area. As with some rivers in the Okavango Delta, the course of the Savute River is therefore reportedly regularly altered by underground tremors and changes.