Qualla: Mokala National Park

Mokala National Park: Introduction

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NJR ZA, CC BY-SA 3.0. Five giraffes walked into a park that did not yet exist. In June 2006, these were the first animals released onto the Wintershoek tract of land southwest of Kimberley, a year before Mokala National Park would even be officially proclaimed. The park was born not from some grand conservation vision but from a bureaucratic problem: the Vaalbos National Park had to be dissolved to settle land claims and diamond prospecting rights, and South African National Parks needed somewhere else to put the animals. What they found, almost by accident, was a 26,485-hectare collision zone between two of southern Africa's great biomes - the flat, sandy Kalahari savanna and the rocky, austere Nama Karoo - a landscape so ecologically rich that it would become one of the country's most important sanctuaries for endangered species.

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Image: NJR ZA | CC BY-SA 3.0

Mokala National Park: Where Two Worlds Meet

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NJR ZA, CC BY-SA 3.0. Walk south from the entrance gate and the land spreads flat to the horizon, scattered camel thorns rising from tall grass like sentinels. This is Kalahari country: sandy soil, umbrella thorns with their distinctive flat canopies, and the extraordinary haystack-shaped nests of soc...

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Image: NJR ZA | CC BY-SA 3.0

Mokala National Park: A Park Born from Loss

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit amanderson2, CC BY 2.0. Mokala's origin story is unusual among national parks. In 1998, when it became clear that Vaalbos would have to be deproclaimed, SANParks studied five potential replacement sites before settling on the Wintershoek property. The land was purchased in 2005, game reintroduction bega...

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Image: amanderson2 | CC BY 2.0

Mokala National Park: The Endangered and the Elusive

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bernard DUPONT from FRANCE, CC BY-SA 2.0. Mokala exists, above all, to protect species that are running out of places to go. Black rhinoceros browse the denser thickets. Roan antelope and sable antelope - both increasingly rare across southern Africa - graze the open plains. Tsessebe, the fastest antelope on the continen...

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Image: Bernard DUPONT from FRANCE | CC BY-SA 2.0

Mokala National Park: Songs at Sunrise

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bernard DUPONT from FRANCE, CC BY-SA 2.0. Birders arrive at first light, and for good reason. Between half past seven and nine in the morning, the Kalahari sandveld comes alive with sound. The crimson-breasted shrike - unmistakable in its scarlet vest - calls from thorn scrub. Fork-tailed drongos mimic the alarm calls of...

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Image: Bernard DUPONT from FRANCE | CC BY-SA 2.0

Mokala National Park: Deeper Traces

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bernard DUPONT from FRANCE, CC BY-SA 2.0. Long before the fences went up, this land carried other meanings. San rock engravings survive across the area - images carved into stone surfaces by people who lived here thousands of years before European settlers arrived. Nearby lies the battlefield of Belmont, where British an...

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Image: Bernard DUPONT from FRANCE | CC BY-SA 2.0