After years navigating Africa’s great rivers by canoe, Steve Boyes made a remarkable discovery: “Dr Livingstone and all of those explorers were wrong.”
Boyes, a South African conservationist, has spent his career mapping and studying some of Africa’s most important river ecosystems. Between 2015 and 2019, as part of the National Geographic Okavango Wilderness Project (NGOWP), Boyes and his team helped to map the lush inland delta formed by the Okavango river and its tributaries in unprecedented detail.
That work resulted in Boyes and the NGOWP being named Rolex National Geographic Explorer of the Year. In 2022, Boyes launched an even more ambitious project: The Great Spine of Africa expeditions, a multiyear, multidisciplinary effort in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. The work aims to overhaul our understanding of Africa’s water basins, which together support hundreds of millions of people, and some of the most diverse wildlife on Earth.
The first expedition, in 2022, saw Boyes and his team traverse the Lungwebungu, thought to be the largest tributary of the Zambezi, the “Great River” best known for its iconic Victoria Falls. Twenty million people, and countless species of plants and animals, rely on the Zambezi’s waters, which flow from Angola and feed Zambia, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique.
Boyes’ team traced the source of the Lungwebungu to the Angolan Highlands water tower, a high-altitude watershed of source lakes and peatlands that feeds into several of southern Africa’s most important river systems. These water towers, Boyes explains, act like a sponge: soaking up precipitation throughout the year and slowly releasing it into rivers sometimes many kilometres away. “It's typically a lifeline during winter for all of these river systems. It's the reason Victoria Falls doesn't dry up. It's the reason the Okavango Delta doesn't dry up—because it doesn't dry up.”
The area where these rivers begin, in the Angolan Highlands, is extraordinarily remote—and woefully understudied. “In all of history, no scientists have been there,” Boyes says. Armed conflict in Angola between 1961 and 2002 meant that the territory was considered impassable to outside researchers. “It was the largest minefield in Africa” when Boyes and his teams consulted maps of the region at the US Library of Congress, where they found little robust data on the water basins. “From the 1750s through until 1950. All the way through, Livingstone, Cameron, Smith—none of them go in there. The rivers are drawn in the wrong direction, or it’s all incorrect, or there’s just a gap.”
Boyes and his team journeyed up the Lungwebungu using mekoros, traditional-style 18-foot dugout canoes, into some of the most remote wilderness in Africa. “This landscape was called the terra do fim do mundo, the ‘land at the end of the Earth’ by the Portuguese, because it’s the farthest place from anywhere,” says Boyes. “It's impossible to traverse because of all of the peatlands.” Aided by river guides from the local communities, Boyes’ team took regular water samples and mapped the river using drone photography, GPS, and a state-of-the-art Doppler flow profiler, to study the river in unprecedented detail. Over time, the team plans to use this data to create “river baselines,” Boyes explains, which can be measured against every decade, to see the impact of climate change and human development.
As a result of that journey, Boyes and his team made a startling discovery. “The source of the Zambezi is the Lungwebungu. Distance-wise, 95 percent of the water coming into the Zambezi is [in] Angola, not Zambia,” Boyes says. “They named the wrong country Zambia.” The claim, if confirmed, will rewrite history, and our understanding of the region’s ecology.
These landscapes are some of the lushest on the planet, and some of the most challenging. “You’ve got sweat bees addicted to the salts in your sweat, so they’re just on you the whole time. Caterpillars that will destroy an entire forest as far as you can see. And then at night, your tent is shining in the moonlight because it’s completely covered in moths. It’s overwhelming, the abundance of life that is there.” It’s also not without risk; this summer Boyes himself was hospitalized with malaria, after catching it on an expedition in Angola.
Among the extraordinary variety of known plants and animals, the team encountered many new ones—among them a fish dubbed Microtenopoma Steveboyesi. “We have 143 new species to science, and we will get up to 250. We've got a tarantula the size of my hand with a horn coming off its back. We’ve found the smallest dragonfly in Africa; a tiny little thing called the lilliput prickleleg. New populations of wild dog and cheetah 700 miles from any other population. It’s extraordinary.”
The Great Spine of Africa series of expeditions is supported by Rolex through its Perpetual Planet Initiative. Throughout its history, Rolex has long supported explorers and conservationists’ work in the world’s wildest places; the Perpetual Planet Initiative, launched in 2019, goes even further in supporting extraordinary individuals and organizations whose work in conservation and scientific research is focused on protecting the planet and its biodiversity.
“Rolex is one of those partners that understand what we’re doing—trying to secure the water security of Africa,” Boyes says. “Rolex is incredibly generous, and they don’t flinch when you talk big. You go to them and say, ‘We’re doing 50 expeditions in the next three years.’ And they go, ‘OK.’ They can see the impact. And they understand how to tell the story.”
Earlier this year, Boyes was in the wild again, following the Kasai River. “It's the largest tributary of the Congo, the biggest river in Africa, and economically a very important river,” Boyes says. The trek saw Boyes travel from Botswana into Congo. “It was the remotest river I’ve ever explored,” Boyes says. Once again, Boyes believes, the team discovered a new source.
These expeditions are just the start. Over the coming years, Boyes’ teams plan to traverse 40,000 km of Africa’s rivers—the equivalent of circumnavigating the Earth. “We’ll be going up the Great Spine of Africa, expanding this work with new teams,” Boyes says. The scientific work from the expeditions is likely to change our understanding of southern Africa’s landscapes, and its history.
But the most rewarding part of this work, Boyes says, is meeting the people along these rivers, and experiencing their connection to nature. “Rivers are transboundary. They never divide people, and people always have shared language across the river,” Boyes says. There are lessons there, for everyone interested in protecting their waters worldwide. “The rivers are sacred to all of the people from the Delta. They have been in the business of clean air and clean water for millennia … For our own rivers, globally, we must all become indigenous again.”
To find out more about Rolex and its Perpetual Planet Initiative, visit rolex.org, and explore our Planet Pioneers partnership page here.
