Pete Le Roux carved Pete’s Pond into the landscape as his answer to the rampant poaching and senseless killing of Africa’s wildlife, acts that bothered him from the moment he arrived in 1985 to conduct a leopard research project as a graduate student from South Africa’s University of Pretoria. Back then a consortium of conservation-minded landowners had established the 183,178-acre (74,131-hectare) range as the Northern Tuli Game Reserve. Game, however, was scarce.

Le Roux believed wildlife could repopulate the reserve if they avoided the Limpopo River, where poachers lurked. Using the remnants of an old irrigation system from the area’s failed attempts to grow cotton, he built a pond as an alternative watering source.

The idea worked. Almost too well. Today some researchers are concerned that the thriving elephant and impala populations have outgrown the land. Plans are now being made to include the reserve as part of the proposed Limpopo/Shashe Transfrontier Conservation Area. This transfrontier park would expand the animals’ territory into a protected reserve in neighboring South Africa and Zimbabwe.

“We have effectively taken an area that was unsuccessful agricultural land and turned it into a viable wildlife preserve,” says Le Roux as he gazes out on the pond. “That is the most rewarding thing we’ve done here, to see the game come back.”

The idea is so simple and obvious that it’s almost startling: Wild creatures know no borders. That is the driving concept behind a conservation movement slowly taking hold throughout this region of Africa as Botswana, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Lesotho, Swaziland, and Namibia actively work to establish a vast system of transfrontier parks that overlay borders created by humans.

The idea dominates much of the thinking—and time—of Pete Le Roux, general manager of Mashatu Game Reserve and David Evans, the reserve’s business manager. Both are pushing governments and private landowners to move more quickly in opening the Limpopo/Shashe Transfrontier Conservation Area.

The proposed reserve, named for the confluence of the two rivers it would encompass, will free about 338,000 acres (137,000 hectares) of land that overlaps the boundaries where South Africa, Botswana, and Zimbabwe meet. That’s slightly more than half the size of Rhode Island. For Le Roux, the transfrontier park is the best answer to ensure the well-being of wild animals, particularly elephants that are nearing the point of overpopulating the greater block of Tuli reserves, which includes Mashatu. Even now, there is an active discussion among government officials over whether elephant herds should be thinned by culling or relocation. “There will be far more different types of habitat included in the bigger picture,” say Le Roux. “And the health and stability of the various species or wildlife populations will increase.”

For Evans the transfrontier park means more tourism, what he considers the best and lowest-impact industry. It’s the key to creating a stronger economic climate that could ultimately defeat poaching, improve the animals’ habitat, and encourage political stability. “The only way conservation can work is if it is self-sustainable,” he says. “At some stage it’s got to pay its own way.”

The Limpopo/Shashe park will be the seventh transfrontier conservation area in Africa’s southern tip. The idea of transfrontier parks goes back to 1922 when South African Prime Minister J. C. Smuts proposed to set aside lands for a botanical reserve along the banks of the Limpopo River. The first real working model, however, occurred in 1948 with a verbal agreement to cross-border cooperation between Botswana and South Africa. That effort was finally formalized in May 2000 with an agreement signed between Botswana President Festus Mogae and South Africa President Thabo Mbeki, establishing the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park in the southern Kalahari Desert.

The greater vision is to build links between all of the countries’ national parks and reserves, an initiative championed in the late 1990s by former South African President Nelson Mandela (Hear Mandela share his dream in “Without Borders: Uniting Africa’s Wildlife Reserves.”) “As visionaries for this park, we have one agenda,” says Evans. “That is to see the old colonial boundaries disappear in the interest of wildlife.”

(Photographs by Roger de la Harpe, Africa Imagery)